


The Ecstasy of Always Bursting Forth

by seabiscuit



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F, It's a goddamn gothic period piece, We've got misty moors, a house haunted by the ghosts of lena luthor's past, so strap in I guess, the taiga
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-18
Updated: 2017-12-05
Packaged: 2018-11-15 18:35:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 22,956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11236821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seabiscuit/pseuds/seabiscuit
Summary: After a series of unfortunate circumstances finds her working for the Luthor family, and particularly their inscrutable only-daughter who has been given the heavy task of repairing the family name, Kara Danvers finds herself falling into an increasingly complicated web of secrets and half-truths. In their voluminous  house on the edge of the Canadian taiga, Kara begins to unravel a story that she's not sure she wants to hear--and come to terms with truths she's been keeping from herself.__Or, the gothic au nobody asked for.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hello all! So recently I guess somebody made a birthday wish that a stranger would write a multichapter Supergirl (2015) fanfiction au modeled after the midcentury gothic genre and centered around a lumber magnate in northern Canada, because I woke up in a cold sweat three weeks ago and this idea hasn't left me since. So!
> 
> 1) I'm lowballing this at 4 chapters, including an epilogue. Could be more, could be less, but most of it is already written and/or outlined. 
> 
> 2) I'm neither a historian or a geographer so take the nitty gritty of this story with a grain of salt. 
> 
> 3) enjoy!

_Each one of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone._

_Ursula Le Guin_

* * *

 

“Kara, aren’t you afraid at all?”

At that moment, Kara Danvers had the distinct thought that she had never been afraid of much of anything before now. Under the blankets of her’s and Alex’s shared bed, she clutched tighter at her family bible, which she had brought to bed with her for the first time since she was a child. Alex hadn’t commented on it one way or the other, seeming to pick up on the sense that things were about to change irrevocably in both of their lives again.

“I’m sad to be leaving you.” Kara whispered, scooting closer to her sister. The bible in her hand knocked up against Alex’s bony hips under the gauzy length of her chemise. “But I’ll be back again soon, Mrs. Grant said that the terms of my contract mean I get a whole two months off every year, so I can come home, and when Winn proposes to you, when you two get married, I can come home then and stay with you.”

Alex laughed quietly. “Don’t get ahead of yourself. Winn hasn’t said anything about proposing yet.”

“Not yet, but he will, Alex, I’m sure of it.”

It was late enough that they had extinguished the lamp in their room for fear of keeping Eliza up. Her leg had been bothering her even more than usual lately, be it from the cold or from the grief. She had been closing up shop earlier the last couple of weeks and going to bed later and twice as restless, sometimes pacing around the darkroom for hours on end. But the trepidation of what was to come the next morning kept them up long into the night, whispering and sighing. The darkness clouded her sister’s face, so her ensuing expression was unreadable to Kara, but seemed to err on the side of sadness. She decided not to pursue the subject further, and they lapsed into quiet, tense silence.

Kara couldn’t even find it within herself to feel excited. Under normal circumstances, this would have been a watershed moment in their lives--a chance for her to move on and gain independence from her family, and to begin contributing to the household like Alex had been doing taking up shifts at the studio. But necessity it was born of, Jeremiah’s getting laid off at the lumber yard, and then his eventual passing, had ruined her appetite for adventure.

She could tell Alex felt the same way, although she wasn’t saying it out loud exactly. Rather, she seemed to be masking it with other emotions. Anger, mostly, and resentment, all focused on the family Kara would officially be employed by come Monday morning.

“Whatever you do, Kara,” Alex began fiercely, her words cutting the heavy silence between them. “Don’t let those bastard Luthors make you feel bad for who you are. Remember who they are, and remember what they did to Pop.”

As if Kara could forget, even for a second. She hugged her bible closer against her stomach, shutting her eyes tightly and running her mind over the names on the pages within over and over again, until they began to run together in her mind and lose meaning.

_Yvo Witold Slusser_

_Aloisa Edith Slusser_

_Karoline Diana Slusser_

 

* * *

 

The next morning, the Danvers house was quiet and still in anticipation of the day that lay ahead. Eliza seemed to have been awake since the crack of dawn, and by the time Kara had entered the kitchen she found a heavy basket of breakfast and bottle of milk laied out for her journey. Her adoptive mother was there also, lingering near the sink. She gave a little start when Kara entered the room.

“Good morning, little one.” She murmured, her voice quiet as if not wanting to disturb the peace of the morning. “You’re up early.”

Unable to sleep, Kara had left Alex’s slumbering body behind in the bed. “I wanted to see you before the Luthors send their carriage.” She said simply, and walked forward into Eliza’s warm embrace. The older woman wrapped her arms tightly around her daughter and breathed in once, deeply, burying her nose into the crown of Kara’s head.

“Well, if you’re up, I could use some help developing yesterday’s photos.”

The rest of the morning was spent together in the dark room bringing to life the prints Eliza had taken at their small photography studio. Mostly they were portraits of families from around the island, but some were simply children, or lovers. A few death portraits as well, although those Kara preferred not to have anything to do with. Eliza was a gifted chemist and thus the only one in 100 miles taking and developing photos. She could charge as much as 50 cents a picture, and people came from all over Newfoundland seeking her services. That morning, Kara did most of the developing, and Eliza simply leaned on her cane in the background and watched, a slight smile on her face.

When the carriage came, she took her basket, which had some hard boiled eggs and bread, and hugged her mother. She said goodbye to Alex, and to Winn and Maggie, who had come to bid her farewell. It was less sentimental than she had thought it would be, but when she finally was settled in the carriage, she was struck by the powerful feeling that nothing in her life would ever be the same after this moment. It gripped her heart, vice like, and she found her breath almost taken away by the weight of it.

Before she could think very, the driver turned around, poking his head into the carriage. “Get cozy in there, Ms. Danvers, it’s going to be a very long ride.”

 

* * *

 

Idlewild was so large it seemed to expand forever into the taiga, and then further still. It took them nearly three quarters of an hour from the time the horses passed the beginning of the property line to arrive at the entrance to the vast main house, where the house staff were lined up to meet them. Kara stuck her head out the carriage window, breathing in the brisk October air and catching her first hard look at the large house that was about to be her home. It was the kind of thing more superstitious men wrote ghost stories about, all large and impassive, with dark windows and ivy crawling up the face of it.

The horses slowed to a stop and the driver stepped out, walking around to the side of the carriage to help Kara down the steps and onto the cobblestone driveway. There were four impeccably dressed staff waiting for her, with one woman, who looked to be older but no less imposing, stepping out to offer a brisk greeting.

“You must be Miss Caroline Danvers.”

“I--well, yes ma’am.” Remembering what Alex had taught her, she beat out a hasty curtsy, stumbling a little as she descended. As she stood back up, she noted “My name is actually Karoline, ma’am, but most people just call me Kara, or, I suppose, Ms. Danvers…”

“No matter,” The older woman waved her words off as if they were simply gnats buzzing around her head. “My name is Mrs. Grant, and I am the head of the house staff for Idlewild. I work most of the time in the kitchens, although I do supervise the cleaning and grounds staff as well.” She paused to give Kara a withering look over the top of her spectacles. “Standing before you is Mr. James Olsen, who looks after the kitchen and keeps house with me, Mr. Hank Henshaw, the head groundskeeper, and Ms. Julia Martin, Ms. Luthor’s ladies maid. There are, of course, other miscellaneous staff populating the house but they are not important and you need not concern yourself with them. They tend to come and go every few months anyway. Do you understand me so far?”

“Yes’m.” Kara murmured.

“Good, you’re not slow. Mr. Olsen will give you a grand tour of the house and show you your room. Ms. Luthor just returned from Labrador yesterday evening and will be expecting you and Mrs. Luthor for dinner this evening. Don’t dally.”

* * *

 

“And this is your room.” James pushed open the heavy oak door and stepped aside to allow Kara to peer in. The room was modest, for sure, but still had an air of charm to it and was larger than most servant’s quarters that Kara had seen. She was struck by the fact that the furniture seemed to be a matching set--a dresser, a nightstand, a writing table and a low-set twin bed--when Maggie had been a ladies maid, her room had clearly been summoned up of haphazard items from the basement and didn’t even have a night stand. She had used a chair that a cook had lent to her after taking pity on her circumstances.

Most striking of all was the large window that overlooked the sprawling gardens of the Luthor’s estate. Kara dropped her suitcases and wandered forward as if in a trance, placing a hand to the glass and peering out. She let out an awed breath that appeared in front of her on the glass and faded as fast as it had come. She had a perfect view of the rose gardens below her and, further on, the taiga that stretched out further than the human eye could see.

Behind her, James cleared his throat quietly. “I trust you will find everything to your liking. There is a wash-basin under the bed, as well as a bedpan. Servants bathe once a week in the washrooms below the kitchen, but you may use the basin whenever suits. Ms. Martin will take away your waste water twice a day.”

“Yes sir, thank you sir.” Kara smiled, and curtsied, remembering everything that Alex had taught her about manners at a polite house. Always say your sir’s and ma’ams. Always curtsy. She was still wearing her bonnet and had mud staining from her boots to the hemline of her skirt. She thought idly that she must look an absolute fright. A blush crept up her neck and threatened to color her cheeks.

James smiled quietly. “You have the afternoon to wash up and unpack. Ms. Luthor will be expecting you and her mother at dinner this evening.”

* * *

 

Her first meeting with Lillian passed by smoothly and mostly without incident. Her previous caregiver had fled the house some weeks before, leaving Mrs. Grant with the task of walking Kara through her daily routine. Mrs. Luthor sat in her bedroom, in a fine wheelchair, with nothing but a slip on and her hair falling in loose grey waves around her shoulders. Her eyes followed Kara and Mrs. Grant as they moved around the room.

“First, you must pick out a dress for her. She can’t move anything below her neck, so you also, obviously, must put her in said dress. Then you must do up her hair--not in one of those provincial fashions that you girls are so fond of,” She looked pointedly at Kara’s frazzled braid crown. “But in a style befitting a lady of her stature. Are we understood?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Well, fine then. You have about an hour until you’re expected at the main dining room. And Lena Luthor does not tolerate tardiness.”

 

* * *

Lena Luthor looked everything and nothing like Kara had expected. There was, of course, a portrait of her and her brother hanging in the office of the lumber yard where Jeremiah had worked. At the time, Jeremiah had knelt beside Kara and told her that their fair complexion was due to a lack of having to work. “Soft hands and white skin,” He had said, gesturing to his own ruddy face with a calloused finger. “That's how you can tell the soft ones from people with real grit, like us.”

Unconsciously, Kara glanced down at her own, rough hands. They were hard and cracked from years of cleaning and outdoor work. She folded them and turned them downwards on her lap, suddenly feeling a flush of shame without reason. Lena looked like a porcelain doll, outfitted in a fine green dress with her dark hair swept up into a proper bun. Eliza had always tried to emulate that style but could never get the bun high enough or tight enough, leaving Kara to always wear her hair in a braided crown instead.

“Ms. Danvers.” Lena murmured. Kara stood from her seat and curtsied, low, head bowed. As she dipped up, she saw a half smile dancing around the corners of her new lady’s mouth. Her expression was clouded with something, amusement almost, tinted with confusion. Whatever it was, it passed by her face like a transient rain cloud, replaced with something far more schooled in an instant. “Have a seat, please.”

Kara did as she was told, moving to resume sitting next to Lillian. The older woman continued to stare forward vacantly as Lena sat at her other side, ringing a small bell to signal the beginning of dinner. On cue, two servants moved forward seemingly from the shadows and placed three dishes in front of them; for Kara and Lena, it was meat, potatoes, and some kind of verdant vegetable. Lillian’s plate held a small amount of stew.

Without waiting for instruction, Kara moved forward as soon as the servants were out of her way. She picked up the napkin from the table and tucked it gently into the collar of Lillian’s dress. “There you are, Mrs. Luthor. Looking quite sharp this evening, if I do say so myself.” She murmured, picking up the spoon and giving the stew a small stir. Tendrils of steam rose up and faded into thin air. Kara’s eyes flickered over for an instant to Lena, who was watching her with the same indiscernible expression as earlier.

Kara cleared her throat, feeling hot under Lena’s steady gaze. “Can she eat on her own, Miss?”

“Yes.” Lena responded, moving a potato around on her plate absentmindedly. “You’ll have to get it to her mouth, but everything else she can do on her own.”

The first spoonful of stew half-spilled and ended up on Lillian’s napkin. Kara swore under her breath and moved to grab another napkin to dab at her mouth, jostling the entire table in the process. Through the clatter of plates and silverware, Lena chuckled lightly. “Don’t be flustered, Miss Danvers. I daresay she’s not lucid enough to care much where you’re spilling stew on her.”

Kara frowned lightly. “Well, you never know, ma’am. Emile Gagnon, from the village, had a stroke too, and our village doctor said that sometimes, even if people can’t move or talk they’re still alive in there and they know what’s going on, and that he thought that even though Mr. Gagnon couldn’t do or say anything, he was still alive and kicking around, you know, in his mind.” She had rambled with scarcely a pause and flushed lightly once she stopped, realizing how provincial it must have all sounded.

“Does he then.” Lena murmured absently. She had set her fork down, but her plate remained untouched in front of her. “Quite right.”

A few minutes passed in inscrutable, untouched silence. Kara helped Lilian with her meal between taking bites of her own while Lena looked on impassively, as if the interaction in front of her was something both completely alien and entirely uninteresting. Kara thought to herself that she had never met such a strange woman before in her life. In the small time that she’d known her, Lena seemed to be a portrait of herself, mostly placid, unmoving. But for a small twitch of the lips or eyes, you almost wouldn’t be able to tell that there was anything at all going on in her head.

Finally, as if breaking a spell she had cast herself, Lena coughed daintily and scratched at her upper lip. Seeming to come out of a trance, she smiled lightly at Kara. “So, Kara, Mrs. Grant tells me you’re from Germany.”

“Yes, Miss.” Kara responded timidly, smoothing her rough hands over the napkin in her lap. “I was born there, but my parents died when I was young. My aunt brought me to Newfoundland to spare me from the factories.”

“And so Mr. and Mrs. Danvers are your aunt and uncle.” Lena concluded, drawing a healthy sip from her wineglass.

“No, Miss.” Kara shook her head. “My aunt left to Germany again in six months’ time. The Danvers picked me up from the orphanage when I was about 13.”

Lena’s eyebrows shot up and she settled her head in a cupped hand in apparent interest. “Quite old, then. And you don’t have a lick of an accent.”

“No Miss, the Danvers schooled it out of me.”

“Do you speak any German?”

“Yes, Miss. A little.” Kara’s mind wandered instinctually to the German bible in her bedside drawer. _Karoline Slusser._

“Well, then.” Lena breathed. Her features softened for one heartbeat, then two. Despite herself, Kara felt her heartbeat quicken as the moment they occupied seemed to take on an absurd sort of significance.  “Quite the extraordinary girl you are, Kara Danvers, to have come this far. And to end up here.” She concluded, almost fondly and not without a touch of irony. She finished her glass of wine, and without having so much as tasted her dinner pushed her chair out and stood. “I hope you’ll forgive me for being so rude, but I think it’s time for me to retire for the evening. Please stay and finish your meal. I trust your first night will be restful.” She moved quietly to the door at the far end of the dining room, leaving a flustered housekeeper gathering her dishes in her wake. She opened the door and paused, thoughtfully, turning to meet Kara’s eyes. “It will get easier with time, I think, for you to be here. So don’t worry about it too much.”

With those final, cryptic words, she moved into the dark hallway and beyond, not making a single sound as she left.

 

* * *

 

After Lena’s sudden departure, Kara had shoveled the rest of her dinner into her mouth, famished, and even had some of her wine. She had never had such a queer day in her life and it left her with a disquieting feeling. Despite Lena’s words, Kara doubted that she would have a restful night.

Lillian didn’t make any kind of fuss as Kara took her back to her room, undressed her, and pulled her chemise over her head. Before her stroke, Lillian had seemed to Kara to be a kind of mythical creature, somebody her community had whispered about in fear and reverence. As she sat behind the older woman and braided her hair for bed, she was struck again by the strangeness of it all. A woman who had such a reputation sitting in front of her, totally malleable, a barely discernable tremor around her mouth the only sign that anything at all was left in her.

She laid Lillian into bed and, pulling her heavy winter bedding to her chin, and touched a hand on her face. Lillian’s eyes fluttered closed without preamble and she seemed to drift completely away all at once.

The thought of returning to her room and going to sleep was totally out of the question. Her large window overlooking the gardens and the taiga, which Kara had marveled at earlier,  seemed sinister after the events of the day. For the first time, she felt acutely how isolated and bizarre her new home was. Kara felt a distinct ache in her stomach and remembered that dinner had been her first meal of the day, other than a few hard boiled eggs and some milk on the carriage ride over. She wondered idly if the kitchen cooks would throw her any scraps for a midnight snack.

Downstairs, she found Mrs. Grant and Mr. Olsen working on scrubbing out the large wood-oven. Rather, James was scrubbing it out as Mrs. Grant stood off to the side, making a grocery list for the next morning and supervising him idly. On her entrance, Mrs. Grant looked up wearily and James popped out of the oven, covered in soot, a friendly smile playing over his face.

“Ms. Danvers,” Mrs. Grant began, a hint of scolding in her voice. “It’s well past nine in the evening, I can’t imagine what you’re hoping to find in the kitchen at this hour.”

“Sorry, Mrs. Grant. I was just still a little hungry after supper and I had hoped--well, if you have any leftovers, or scraps, I haven’t eaten almost at all today, and I--”

“Don’t worry about it, Miss, we have some leftover bread from lunch in the pantry.” James stood at his full height and snatched a wet cloth from the counter, passing it once over his face and then rubbing the soot off his hands. Even in the dim lighting of the kitchen and after a long day Kara noted how handsome he looked, his features were strong and dark, and his eyes were surprisingly kind.

“Not watching our figure, I see.” Mrs. Grant commented breezily, returning to her grocery list as if no disturbance had occurred at all. She pushed her spectacles up her nose and, after a moment’s thinking, scribbled _‘turnips’_ on the scrap of paper in front of her.

James returned with a small roll, breaking it cleanly and offering Kara half. She accepted it gratefully.

“How was your first dinner with the lady of the house?”

“Fine.” Kara mumbled over a mouthful of bread. “She’s a bit...queer, though, I must say.” In the background, Mrs. Grant rolled her eyes and wrinkled her nose just slightly, as if somebody had just told a joke that only she understood.

James hummed in understanding. “Ms. Luthor is one of a kind, that’s for sure. But if you want my advice, Miss, I’d stay out of her way if you can. I know she might seem harmless at first, but she didn’t get where she is now from being timid.”

Behind him, Mrs. Grant set down her pencil testily and placed a stern hand on her hip. “That is quite enough, Mr. Olsen. You know very well that I do not tolerate any church-mouse gossip in my kitchen. Ms. Danvers, you may finish your pilfered snack upstairs in your room.”

It wasn’t a request. Bidding them both a hasty goodnight, Kara turned on her heel and made her way back up the stairs, cramming the last of her bread into her mouth as she went.

 

* * *

 

The house was entirely quiet as she made the ascent to her bedroom on the third floor. Hank had stoked a fire that had since turned to near-embers, leaving the room cast in an eery glow. Just as Kara had feared, the taiga had taken on a strange presence under the light of the waning moon. She peered out of her window, candle in hand, simply observing for a moment the nighttime movements of the forest. It was barely October and yet the trees had already assumed an almost skeletal appearance. It would be an early winter.

Shuddering to herself, she drew the gauzy curtains fiercely and made quick work of her daytime dress and braid crown. In the time before she could slip into her chemise, the cold air of the room hit her bare body and she had a sudden, unbidden thought of Ms. Luthor’s face. Her cold, unknowable expression that had melted into something almost like kindness near the end of the night.

_Quite the extraordinary girl you are, Kara Danvers._

Kara shivered.

* * *

 

A tentative routine came forth from then on. Over the next three weeks, Kara became acutely attuned to Lillian’s, and by extension, Lena’s routines. In the morning, She and Lillian would join Lena in the informal dining room for a light breakfast. Lillian would have oatmeal with, on Kara’s insistence despite her lady’s protest that her mother likely couldn’t even _taste_ it, for God’s sake, a small dap of maple syrup. Lena had eggs, plain toast, black coffee, and two cigarettes that she took lazily, one after the other, at the table. Most of the time, she brought work or the daily paper with her to the table and paid little mind to Kara and her mother. Sometimes, she would make idle small-talk with Kara, about the weather, and how business was coming.

Lena had remained as withdrawn and detached as she had been at their first dinner and, save for their conversation about Kara’s upbringing, they never spoke about anything of consequence. This, despite the fact that Kara had begun to feel like she was simply a moon that had been sucked into Lena’s powerful orbit. Everything she did revolved around her schedule, her movements in the house, her cigarette breaks. She never again asked Kara about herself, and never shared anything about herself in return. Her smiles were rare and, when they did appear, it was always colored with the ghost of something else. Irony, perhaps, or general amusement. It was as if she found something inherently absurd about the situation they found themselves in, although Kara could not for the life of herself figure out why.

After breakfast, Lena generally disappeared into her study to work by correspondence for the rest of the afternoon. She rarely, if ever, emerged, and her lady’s maid would usually deliver a cold lunch into the room which would re-emerge half eaten some hours later. Kara spent her afternoons with Lillian in the drawing room, embroidering, or reading to her. Although they were in the middle of a perilously cold fall, on nicer days she would wrap her charge in a shawl and sit with her in the gardens among the waning foliage.  

She found a strange peace in her new life around the second week, although she still missed home terribly, and exchanged letters with Alex at least five times a week. They mostly covered the mundanities of their separate lives; what they’d eaten for breakfast that morning, the finer points of what dress Ms. Luthor had chosen to wear for the day, and how Eliza’s photography business was getting on. Kara tried several times to broach the subject of Winn, as she was still confident he would soon propose, but Alex had usually diverted the conversation to other subjects. Mostly Maggie, and sometimes Eliza.

Overall, she had settled in better that she had initially expected, even striking up friendships with most of the house staff including, most memorably, James. Mrs. Grant tolerated her enough, and by the end of her first week, had begun teaching her the basics of cooking because “If you are going to haunt my kitchen every night like a towheaded spectre you may as well make yourself useful.”

It all continued on undeterred until one night, just going on a month since she had begun working for the Luthors, things changed, if only imperceptibly at first. It was an unusually cold and restless evening at the end of October. The wind beat fiercely on the panes of her window and Kara had the sudden and strange feeling that nothing, not the blankets piled on top of her or the dying coals in the hearth, would protect her from the weather. She tried several times, futilely, to get to sleep before giving up and rolling out of bed, shivering as her bare feet touched the frigid hardwood below her.

She reached blindly for her robe and pulled it around her, covering her body and barely-there chemise, and slipped on two large wool socks that Eliza had made for her as a going away gift. She had made up her mind almost before leaving bed that she would slip downstairs, quiet as a mouse, fix herself a nip of tea to warm her bones and slip right back up again.

As soon as she stepped through her door, however, she was stopped in her tracks by a slight figure coming down the hall behind her. Her heart nearly stopped in her chest when she fully realized who it was.

Lena Luthor, in a similar state of undress, looking as caught off guard as Kara had ever seen her. Her robe, much finer than the one that Kara had on, was slipped down over one shoulder and exposing the curve of her breast through her thin nightgown. Kara looked down and felt a traitorous blush creep up the back of her neck. Lena’s eyes followed her gaze and she frowned in surprise, quickly closing the robe tighter around her body.

“Ms. Danvers,” She said quietly, taking a few steps forward so that Kara could more clearly see her face illuminated by the light of her candle. “To what do I owe the pleasure of this chance encounter?”

“I, um,” Kara cleared her throat. Her body suddenly had a queer energy to it and she was feeling not as cold as she had just minutes ago. “I’m sorry, Ma’am, my room was very cold and I couldn’t sleep so I just, I thought I would go downstairs and have some tea to warm up.”

A small, familiar smile lit up Lena’s face. “It seems we’re headed to the same place. Why don’t we go downstairs together.”

 

* * *

 

 

The tea kettle gurgled softly on the stove as Lena set down a plate of biscuits in front of Kara. “Tuck in.” She murmured, not unkindly, and took a seat next to her at the large butcher’s block counter in the kitchen. “I must admit, I come down here more often than I’d like, especially in the winter. It gets so drafty upstairs I can hardly bear it.” She delicately picked up a biscuit and bit down into it, looking pensive. “Somehow, Mrs. Grant keeps the kitchen so warm, even though it seems counterintuitive.”

Kara couldn’t find a single word within her to contribute to the conversation, nor could she keep the helplessly flustered look off her face. This was the most Lena Luthor had spoken to her in one sitting since her first night at Idlewild. She seemed so unguarded, so effortlessly warm, and endearingly human sitting in front of Kara in nearly nothing at all, nibbling on a biscuit and waiting for the tea to come to a boil.

“Yes, it’s very warm.” Kara stated, cringing inwardly. Lena must think her some kind of neanderthal flatfoot. Whatever thoughts Lena had, she didn’t betray them on her face. A genial, tired smile remained in place as the kettle loudly came to a boil behind them.

“Ms. Danvers, I feel like I owe you an apology.” She began, pouring them both a cup of tea and sitting back down across from Kara. “I’m afraid I’ve been really quite nasty to you these past couple of weeks--ignoring you, mostly--and I just wanted to say, it wasn’t at all my intention to make you feel unwelcome in my home. In fact,” Lena met Kara’s eyes dead on, and it felt suddenly and absurdly like the first time anybody had ever looked at Kara in her life. For some reason, her right inner thigh felt like pins and needles--her body had never had such a traitorous and confusing reaction to anything, let alone a glance from a near stranger. “In fact, it’s quite nice to have somebody of my own age, and my own sex, in the house. It’s been...quite some time.”

“I understand, it must be very lonely up here with nobody to keep you company.” Kara responded breathlessly.

A startling laugh escaped Lena’s mouth and they both looked equally shocked by it. She passed one hand over her face as though she couldn’t quite synthesize the words Kara was saying to her. “Yes, yes, it’s been unimaginably lonely.” She said, almost more to herself than to her companion. Lena took a long sip of her tea before continuing. “Did you know that I was adopted as well?”

“No, Ma’am.”

“Well, I was. My real mother was some...distant cousin of Lillian Luthor’s, my father was a scoundrel, I suppose. She fell pregnant with me when she was 15 years old and died having me. They said I would have died too, that I should have died too. But I didn’t.” Lena’s brows twitch together, and then relax. “My mother used to say to me, about the woman who gave birth to me, she used to say that she was lucky that she had died instead of living with the shame of having a baby out of wedlock. Living with the shame of having me.”

Her mouth  moved quietly after she was finished speaking, as if she was considering saying more on the subject but couldn’t find the right words within herself. In the end, it seemed she decided on nothing, and finished the last of the tea in her cup instead.

“Ms. Luthor, I--”

“Please, Kara.” Kara shook a little. Nobody had used her Christian name in weeks. “When we’re alone, like this, you may just call me Lena. I would prefer it that way, if it’s all the same to you.”

“Yes, yes, I will.” Kara was nodding furiously, unsure why but feeling extremely anxious all the same. Without saying another word, Lena stood and placed her tea cup in the wash bin before slipping out of the room again and bidding Kara a quiet goodnight.

Kara would get no sleep that evening.


	2. Chapter 2

“You tuck the knife under the skin, like this, just enough to peel the corner back, and then take it between your thumb and forefinger and--Ms. Danvers, are you even listening to me?” Cat Grant looked up testily from the salmon fillet she had set on the butcher’s block between herself and Kara. A long suffering sigh passed through her lips. Her would-be pupil was looking off into space with parted lips and a look so glazed-over it would have been comical if it wasn’t so frustrating.

“Yes Mrs. Grant--oh.” Kara flushed and scratched a cheek, seeming to sense that she’d been caught. Mrs. Grant gestured at her with the fillet knife pointedly.

“Tell me why I spend my time trying to better you as a person when all you’ve been doing lately is drifting off like a love-sick school brat.”

“Is that a rhetorical question?”

“Yes, Ms. Danvers, it seems you’ve finally grasped the concept. I don’t know what virile young buck has been the subject of your recent interest, and frankly, the very thought of it makes me quite ill. But when you are in my kitchen, under my tutelage, I expect you to pay attention.”

“Yes Mrs. Grant.” Kara murmured, sufficiently cowed. The truth was, she hadn’t been captivated by anybody working at Idlewild, not really, but a week had past since her unexpected meeting with Lena and she hadn’t been able to quite shake the thought of her completely. Or at all. Lena’s blunt confession that evening mixed with their less glacial personal relationship had been negging at Kara, even when she felt like it shouldn’t. It was a good thing, wasn’t it, that she and her mistress were getting along so well? She knew a hundred girls in the village who would have killed to have a similar relationship with their ladies.

Although they hadn’t spoken alone since, Lena had seemed to relax at their daily breakfasts and when she joined them for dinner. Her new mood seemed a softer, more pliable version of her previous, more self-deprecating shell.  Kara got the sense that their night together was a secret that they held between them, something somehow precious, and not anything she should be casually mentioning to people like Mrs. Grant.

Last night, and the night before, Kara had lain awake in her bed, sighing like a schoolgirl and attempting to stretch her ear to the hallway for a hint of Lena’s footsteps, or a light tapping on the door. She knew it was ridiculous, of course. Bordering on delusional, in fact. Thinking about it raised questions that Kara feared she might never have the answer to, like why she did it, and why the thought of another evening spent alone with Lena in the bowels of the house was so appealing.

This all had caused her mighty distress and interrupted her week’s sleep schedule, and she had found it hard to focus on anything, even Mrs. Grant’s brisk cooking lessons. She generally possessed a few hours a day while Lillian was napping or otherwise predisposed with Lena or a maid to putter about, but she had been losing interest lately in even her most preferred activities. She was beginning to feel like she was observing herself from the outside, seeing herself moon over a single moment in time that had since come and gone, and powerless to stop any of it.

“Good Lord, Ms. Danvers, should I call for a doctor or do you expect to recover from your coma anytime soon?”

“I’m so sorry Mrs. Grant, I haven’t been sleeping so well lately.”

“Well--here come and skin this salmon, child--well, I hope that you will have improved your attitude by the time that Ms. Luthor returns from Labrador.”

Kara had just gotten purchase on the slippery skin with her thumb and forefinger and ended up ripping the skin from the salmon all at once in surprise, her eyebrows knitting together. “Ms. Luthor is going back to Labrador so soon?”

“So this, you’re interested in. Humph. Ever since that nasty business with Mr. Luthor she has to go there every month or so to to calm a riot or make her presence known, many of the provincial flatfoots at the lumber mills are still unused to the idea of a young woman as the head of their company.”

Lena hadn’t mentioned anything about a visit to Labrador, and Kara had thought that their conversations were warming up recently, broaching on friendly. She huffed a little as Mrs. Grant hastily glossed over the subject and directed her to fry up the salmon skin to throw to the resident mouser and then take her girlish sulking someplace else.

She left the kitchen and, finding Mrs. Luthor still resting quietly in bed, proceeded to drift across the large house toward the staircase. She passed the door to Lena’s office on the way, pausing briefly to consider if Lena was thinking about her as much as she thought of the young heiress. Kara shook her head. It was simply impossible.

Upstairs in her room she found the day’s mail. A letter from Alex, and one from Eliza as well. Eliza’s letter produced a photograph of her adoptive mother and sister that would find it’s home in her desk drawer alongside a faded picture of the family with Jeremiah. Alex’s letter was typically lengthy and purple. Kara made herself comfortable at the desk and used her pointer finger to keep her place as she read, just the way her older sister had taught her, sounding out words quietly when she could not understand them. Even though her spoken English was nearly impeccable, it wasn’t her first language, and she had only learned to read and write in it in the last two or three years. She knew Alex wrote her letters to be purposefully dense to challenge her, and encourage her to improve her writing back.

Her sister dedicated two pages to Maggie Sawyer. Particularly, how she was getting on teaching piano to school children (very well), her progress at learning embroidery (not quite as fine as her skills at the piano, but Alex was sure she would improve well with time), and how she often filled the spot that Kara used to occupy by Alex’s side in bed. Curiously, her only mention of Winn was two lines dedicated to how quickly he was catching on as Eliza’s assistant in the photo laboratory. Kara sighed and sat back in her chair, placing the letter delicately on the desktop. More and more recently it was beginning to feel as though everybody was in on a joke that she had been purposefully left out of. The more she tried to center her life, the more it began to spin out of control--starting with Jeremiah’s passing, and ending here, at the Luthor mansion, working for the family indirectly responsible for his death.

She covered her face with a hand. What would Alex think, if she knew how often Kara thought of Lena Luthor, and how fondly? What would Eliza think? She could hardly explain the queer attraction to herself, only knew that it relented for nothing, no matter how hard she tried to dispel those thoughts from her head. Kara allowed herself two more minutes of self pity before smoothing out her skirt and tucking the letters back into her desk drawer. Regardless of her feelings, she had a job to do.

* * *

 

That night, Kara had the first of many strange dreams.

She was at Idlewild, in the gardens, wearing nothing but her chemise and walking across the grass as if in a trance. In her dream, she knew what was waiting for her in the woods. In her dream, she knew exactly where she was going. She crossed the treeline into the coniferous taiga and let the pine needles scrape across her nearly-bare arms, her hair, her sappy feet. Lena was there waiting for her, her body haloed in trees and earth, wearing that same knowing look. Only, in this dream, it didn't frustrate Kara, it enthralled her, made her feel like every square inch of her skin was a living thing, hot and needy

When they embraced on the damp earth, it felt familiar and totally alien all at the same time. Kara’s body moved like it knew something she didn't, low and primal, and they rubbed against each other, faces, thighs, arms, breasts, until, until--

_Thump, thump--_

Kara startled awake and sat straight up in bed, sweating and seized with the feeling like she had almost held something in her hand but that it had escaped her and was moving further and further away by the moment. The feeling was concentrated squarely between her legs. Frantically she tucked her hand there, briefly, trying to alleviate some of the ache.

_Thump, thump--_

“Just a moment!” She called, hastily snatching her watch from the side table. It was just shy of 11:30. She swung her legs out of bed, grabbed blindly for her robe, and threw it on over her chemise. She trotted over to the door, opening it just a sliver. “Lena, my goodness.”

She stood face to face with Lena Luthor, her face partially eclipsed by shadow and partially illuminated by a candle in her hand. Her eyes widened slightly, as if she hadn’t really anticipated that Kara would open the door. “Ms. Danvers, I--” She opened her mouth, shut it again, and worked her jaw some. Whatever it was that was happening in her head, however she was attempting to process it into words, it came out as this: “It’s another cold night.” As soon as she had said it, Lena herself seemed dumbstruck by her words.

There was a beat of incongruous silence. Kara was waiting for Lena to say something else, or to give any other reason for her sudden appearance at her bedroom door at nearly midnight. When nothing seemed forthcoming, she supplied: “Yes, it’s another cold night.” And then after lowering her voice an octave, “Lena, if you insist on me using your first name, and showing up at my door so late in the evening, I must insist on you calling me Kara.”

She watched as a smile tugged at the corner of Lena’s mouth. “Very well, Kara. I was wondering if you wanted to join me downstairs again. For another cup of tea.”

Kara blinked. Images from her dream still flickered in the back of her mind like a flipbook and she struggled to maintain a straight face. She was furtively trying to discern if this was real life, or another dream within a dream. Would they really go downstairs to the kitchen, or would Lena lead her out into the taiga, hold her hands and draw her down into the damp earth--

“Kara?”

“Oh I’m sorry--yes, yes, I would love a cup of tea, Lena, thank you.”

They moved together out of Kara’s bedroom and into the almost-stillness of the house. Every other soul in the house had long since gone to bed, and the relative peace amplified every creak, gust of wind, and general settling within. Lena lead them down the stairs and through room after dark room with the sureness that could only be possessed by somebody who had grown up there, spent endless hours memorizing every nook and cranny and secret passageway. Her stocking feet barely made a sound as they pattered on through the dining room and down the stairs to the kitchens below.

Little was said between them as Lena held a match to two lanterns, then crouched to kindle a small but sure fire in the woodstove. The tea kettle was filled, placed on the top of the stove, and left to boil as Lena rummaged around the pantry for a snack. Watching her stand up on her tiptoes to reach something on the top shelf, Kara was struck by the words Lena had said to her the last time they were there. How she prefered to be downstairs on cold winter nights like that one. Kara thought of Lena as a young girl, slipping down into the kitchen, fetching a snack and a cup of tea. Bundled in a blanket perhaps, or perhaps warming her feet in front of the warm wood stove as Kara was doing now.

She was startled out of her reverie by Lena setting down a half loaf of bread and some hard cheese in front of her, as well as two cups and a small bottle of milk. She smiled shyly at Kara and ripped off a small portion of the bread for herself, which Kara took as her cue to dig in. Hastily, she went in for a sizable chunk of bread, cut herself a piece of cheese, and poured a half a glass of frothy milk.

“I swear,” Lena murmured “that I have never seen another woman eat quite as much as you do. Where do you put it all?”

Kara looked up, her cheeks puffed out with food. She quickly finished chewing and swallowed. “I’m used to working all day in the yard and chopping wood with Jeremiah. I guess my metabolism hasn’t really adjusted to being a proper lady yet.” She grinned cheekily “From now on I’ll have to watch my figure.”  

“Nonsense. You’ll eat as much as you want.” Lena waved her off, picking off a piece of bread and thoughtfully slipping it past her lips. As if just thinking of it, she reached into the folds of her robe and produced a silver cigarette case, very fine and bearing her monogram in the lower left hand corner. Snapping it open, she plucked one hand-rolled cigarette for herself, and one to offer to Kara.

“Oh no--I don’t really smoke.”

“Really.” Lena pressed one of the cigarettes between her lips and struck one of the matches that lay in the case against the butcher’s block table. “I’d heard somewhere that all girls from the provinces smoked like chimneys.”

Kara snorted. “Technically I’m not from the provinces, am I?”

“Touche. Do they not have cigarettes in Germany?”

“None that I ever saw,” Kara responded drolly, and Lena snickered. She poured two fingers of milk into her glass and tapped her cigarette into it, absently. “I’d heard somewhere that it’s untoward for ladies who were raised in fine old houses to smoke cigarettes.”

Lena leaned forward on one elbow, cradling her head in a hand. “It was one of my classes in finishing school.”

They smiled, and laughed, and in the background the kettle boiled and Lena stood and busied herself pouring them both a cup. “I heard that you’re going to Labrador soon.”

“Hm? Yes, on Thursday. Who told you that? Not my mother, surely.”

“No, silly. It was Mrs. Grant.”

“Well, on my life, I’d never taken Mrs. Grant to be the house gossip.”

“It wasn’t _gossip,_ it was just…” Kara stirred a cube of sugar into her tea. “I’m glad she told me, I would have been upset if you had just...spirited away into the night without telling me.”

“Kara, I would hardly _spirit away,_ I have to take a horse and carriage for goodness’ sake, it’s not really _discreet_.”

“That’s not what I meant.” Kara huffed. Lena’s face relaxed into a soft smile.

“I’m sorry. I really didn’t think it would matter much to you. If I did, I would have told you.”

“Well it does,” Kara sighed, meeting Lena’s steady gaze head on. “It matters to me. We’re friends, sort of, aren’t we?”

“Of a sort, yes.” Lena acquiesced, taking a small, thoughtful sip of her tea. They shared a few moments of comfortable silence, each of them wrapped in their own thoughts, before Lena spoke up again. “Can I ask you something?”

“Of course, anything.”

Lena paused, looking almost shy. “If I were to--would it be too forward of me, if I wanted to write to you while I was away.”

“Of course not.” Kara responded breathlessly, almost too eagerly. She wasn’t sure how long Lena was to spend in Labrador, after all, and it could really be weeks or even more than a month. It would be a real shame to see the friendship they had just begun to build up fray into loose ends. Realizing how zealous she sounded, she tempered her statement with, “It would make me happy, Lena, for us to--to correspond, with one another.”

Lena chortled, seeming a little bolder. “Then I will, although I must warn you it will all be very mundane.”

Try as she might, Kara simply could not school the fervid look off of her face. Lena Luthor wanted to share the mundanities of her life with her--the thought of it was almost excruciating. She could feel how hot her face was and knew she must look a complete fool. “I’m already looking forward to it, Lena.”

“There’s one more thing. I have to confess, I didn’t ask you down here totally without pretense. There’s something else I wanted to ask you and I’m afraid it’s a little more serious.”

“As I said, anything.”

“Why are you here?”

The question bowled Kara over with it’s bluntness. She had presumed, of course, and Lena must have known at least a little something about her family history, and must also be at least somewhat self-aware of her own family’s reputation in Newfoundland. They were _Luthors,_ after all, and carrying that name did not come lightly. She had expected that the subject might come up at some point, of course, but hadn’t expected that it would come so simply and briskly.

“I’m not sure exactly what you’re asking.”

“What I mean to say is--I know that your father worked for the mill when Lex oversaw it and I know that something terrible happened to him, and I don’t know, but I have this sick feeling that my family had something to do with it.”

“He died.”

“What?”

“Jeremiah, my father, there was an accident at the mill and he--he died shortly after.”

Lena pitched forward, putting her head into her hands and sighing greatly. Her cigarette sat in the saucer of her teacup, forgotten and smouldering along. In that instant she seemed so small, so incredibly helpless. It was as if she knew the truth but wasn’t ready to hear it out loud from Kara’s lips. “So what are you doing here?” She mumbled from behind her fingers. “What on earth could you possibly want to do with my family after all of this?”

“To be honest, I--well, I didn’t have much of a choice. When Jeremiah died, it was obvious pretty quickly that the money we were making from Eliza’s photography business wasn’t going to cut it, so me and Alex had to go out and find work. Only, Alex doesn’t exactly have the temperament to be a house servant, and I have no experience and no proper schooling in Canada. I can barely read or write in English, truth be told. So when I saw the posting up for the job here, and I applied, and I got it--I must be honest. It was come to work here or let my family, the family that had been so kind to me all those years ago, that had saved my life, let them fall to ruin.”

The dark-haired woman across from her had a damp, faraway look in her eyes. She was nodding her head along almost imperceptibly, and had resumed ownership of her cigarette, tapping it idly against the inside of a delicate knuckle. “But I must tell you, although I was hesitant at first, these last few months have really changed my mind about you. I don’t regret it at all, coming to work here. In fact, it feels a little like...well, a little like fate, maybe. I’m glad to have met you. You’re so much different from your family, you’re so…” Try as she might, Kara couldn’t conjure up the right words to say what she was feeling. There were none that she knew in English. “You’re so _you._ And it’s wonderful.”

Their eyes met and for a moment Kara thought Lena might really burst into tears on the spot. She looked right at the precipice of falling totally apart, as if Kara might deal one parting blow and break her completely to pieces. “You’re very kind, Kara.” Her voice was a tremor.

“Just honest, really.”

“No,” Lena’s free hand shot out, covering Kara’s. “You are _kind,_ Karoline Danvers. You are a good person, I really mean that. Too good for the likes to me.”

Kara opened her mouth to protest, but Lena waved her off one-handed. She finished the last dregs of her cigarette, dropped it into her glass of milk, and passed one exhausted hand over her face. It felt like an attempt to resent, to put the fraughtness of the last half hour behind her, or to re-don the mask that she had been wearing before. As she gathered herself, Kara began to collect their dishes to put in the sink. It must have been past 1 in the morning--and she had to be up at 5:30 sharp to get Mrs. Luthor ready for her day.

“One last thing before you go, Kara...can you come to my chambers tomorrow night around 10 in the evening.”

Kara sputtered and nearly dropped her armful of dishes. “Yes, of course, but...why?”

“The way you do my mother’s hair, it's….well, frankly, it’s atrocious. And I’m sure you’re skilled at other things, Ms. Danvers, but she looks like she just had a particularly taxing day at the coal mines."

Kara blushed, and then laughed, pleased when Lena began to laugh along with her. “So you’re going to give me lessons?”

  
Lena reached into the voluminous folds of her robe again, producing another cigarette. Kara supposed she would be downstairs for a long while after she departed. “Yes, Kara. I’m going to give you lessons.”

* * *

 

Kara knocked on the door of Lena’s chambers nervously. It was only a quarter of 10, but she had been so anxious all day to spend time with Lena again that she could scarcely wait another minute. It was relieving when the door cracked open and she could see her friend’s comforting smile welcoming her into the room.

“Come in.”

They chatted a little about their days as Lena prepared a space for them to do their practice. In the end, she sat on the end of her four-poster bed and beckoned Kara to sit on a stool between her legs so they were directly in front of her large vanity mirror. “You have such beautiful hair, Kara.” She hummed, beginning to unpin her bulky braid. Kara found herself humming and tipping her head back into Lena’s grip. She ran her hands through, shaking them gently to release some of the knots. From the mirror in front of them, she could observe the strange scene they made. Kara, in a threadbare nightgown, her hair a wild, akimbo mess, and Lena behind her with a soft look on her face, gently working her hands at the back of Kara’s neck.

Kara sighed in pleasure as Lena picked up the ivory comb next to her and began to brush through the tangles. “I’ll miss you when you leave.”

“I’ll miss you, too.”

“And you’ll really write to me?”

“I really will.”

The moment was totally devoid of the pretense that usually clouded their interactions. Kara had a feeling that she could only describe as a queer sort of nakedness. The way Lena was looking at her in the mirror in front of them, Kara would have believed that she could see straight through her. Her body seemed loose, warm, pliable. Increasingly, she felt herself letting her head fall against Lena’s hands, or the tips of her fingers skim around her ankle. It was like she had been put under some kind of spell, or rather the opposite--like she had been freed of a spell, here, alone in Lena’s bedroom, thrumming hot and vital with _something._ What, she couldn’t be sure. But it felt like she was straining with potential energy, like her body was trying to leave itself.

Lena pulled at Kara’s hair, sharply but not unkindly, holding it in her fist in the shape of a ponytail. Kara shuddered, feeling the last of the tension leave her body in a wave. She was sure, then, for one senseless moment, that she would do anything that Lena asked of her.

“Kara,” She murmured, voice barely above a whisper. Kara’s eyes drifted up, meeting Lena’s eyes in the mirror for two, then three heady moments. Lena had her hair separated and piled high on her head, with tendrils of it falling down around her face. She noted passingly that she must have been trying to do it up like a Gibson Girl. “I have to confess something.”

Kara must have managed out something affirmative, because Lena continued promptly. “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about...what we spoke about, yesterday evening in the kitchen. About your father. When did he pass?”

“Almost a year ago.”

Their eyes met again in the mirror and there was a distinct shift in the tension between them. Something sinister settled in the pit of Kara’s stomach.

“How did it happen?”

“He lost two fingers running a log through the sawmill. Lex was overseeing that particular mill, at the time, and when he, he, he--” Her fingers were trembling on her lap, she realized. She held one hand in the other in an effort to steady herself and wring something cogent out of her feelings. There was a warmth on her shoulder; Lena’s hand. It was firm but not insistent, simply resting without moving or squeezing. “When he wouldn’t finish his day of work, Mr. Luthor laid him off. He came down with a fever the next night, and well. Well, it didn’t get much better after that.”

“And after that, when Lex did what he did. And when those people did what they did to Lex. Did it make you feel...did it give you any vindication?”

Kara’s head inclined ever so slightly. “It made me feel better that he couldn’t hurt those poor people any longer. But it would never--it could never bring Jeremiah back to us. Nothing could. In the end, I guess, it was a cold comfort.”

“I’m sorry.” Lena whispered. Instinctually, Kara’s hand moved up to cover her companion’s and squeeze firmly. She could see that Lena’s eyes were full with unshed tears, her brow furrowed and her mouth pulled tight with poorly concealed conflict.

“It’s not your fault, it’s not your fault,” Kara turned, letting her loosely pinned hair fall free and clambered up into Lena’s arms. The darker haired woman swept her up without a second of hesitation, pressing Kara’s body firmly against hers and burying her face in the crook of Kara’s neck. She could feel hot tears running against her skin. “You’re not like them, Lena. You’re nothing like them.” She pulled away for an instant, cupping Lena’s face in her hand and rubbing away a tear from her face absentmindedly. “You’re so much better than they could ever be.”

Meanwhile, Lena was gazing up into her face as if Kara had just hung the stars and the moon into the sky in front of her. Her mouth was slightly parted and slack, eyes shining, face damp and open and so _devastated_ looking that it knocked the wind out of her. For an insane, hopeless moment, Kara really thought she might surge forward and kiss her.

The thought settled inside of her, discomforting and wonderful.

“Kara, I--” Lena closed her eyes and swallowed, resting her hand on top of Kara’s. “I think you’re amazing and you’ve been such a wonderful friend to me these last months. But I have to...I should go to bed, before I do something that I might regret.”

“Something you might regret?” Kara parroted in hushed confusion. Instead of responding, Lena leaned forward and pressed a soft kiss against Kara’s cheek.

“I’m sorry we didn’t get the chance to finish your hair tonight. When I get back from Labrador, we’ll have to try again.”

Kara felt butterflies light up her stomach at the thought of it.

* * *

 

 

That night, Kara had the same dream, only this time Lena kissed her. In their embrace on the forest floor, Lena tangled her hands in her hair, angled their hips together, and _pressed,_ and then pressed again, and then pressed her tongue past Kara’s lips, and her hand against her inner thighs--

She woke up feeling as though she was weighted to her bed with a hundred stones, pent up and confused. Doing the only thing she could think of, Kara wretched a pillow from underneath her head and rolled onto her stomach, placing it between her legs. She ground her hips down, rucking her nightgown part of the way up her thighs and letting out an almost anguished moan. Her body was on fire in a way it had only been a few times before, and never this badly. She felt as though she really might die if she didn’t do something to relieve the ache.

Again and again, she rubbed herself into the pillow, cramming her head against her mattress to muffle the moans. She flicked through her usual list of fantasies, the ones she used when she would wake from a particularly fraught dream and take her pillow downstairs at night to do it in the barn and away from Alex. Some dirty daguerreotypes Winn had shown her when they were children. A flash of Alex’s breast she had caught a glimpse of when she was 14 or 15. The fine muscles of James’s arms as he worked bread dough on the butcher’s block, and finally--

Lena Luthor, her mouth hot on Kara’s, her body fixing a wild rhythm between her thighs. Kara shouted her release into her pillow, trembling and guilty.

 

* * *

 

The day of Lena’s departure came with little fanfare. Lena took her breakfast with Kara and Mrs. Luthor as usual before disappearing into her room to change into her traveling outfit. She emerged, looking as fine as anybody who was about to travel several hundred miles by carriage, and leaned to kiss her mother goodbye. As she stooped over, she reached and discreetly tangled her fingers with Kara’s, giving her hand a little squeeze.

The last thing she gave to Kara was a meaningful look as she left the house to join her carriage.

The rest of the day passed att a kind of subdued pace. Mrs. Luthor was drowsy, maybe because of the bleak turn the weather had taken, leaving Kara to put her to bed around 6 after a heated dinner refusal. After leaving her chambers, she found James and Mr. Henshaw fixing a bannister in the drawing room.

“Heyo, Miss.” James called, raising a hand in greeting. “How’s the day been?”

“Alright, Mr. Olsen. Mrs. Luthor gave me quite the fuss when I tried to get her to have a bite of dinner, though.”

James laughed quietly. “Something must be in the air tonight. Mrs. Grant has been on quite the tear as well.”

“Any particular reason?”

“Some food went missing from the pantry. She thinks there must be a thief afoot.”

Kara snorted. “She might be right. We’re a shady bunch, after all.”

“She said she wanted to speak to you, anyway, when you were done with your business for the evening. You should try to head down before she closes up shop in the kitchen.”

This peaked Kara’s curiosity. Generally Catherine Grant seemed to find her to be a nuisance and she couldn’t remember a time in recent history when the woman had actually requested her presence in the kitchen. Bidding James and Hank goodbye, she beat a hasty retreat through the house and down the stairs to the kitchen. There, she found Mrs. Grant slicing a batch of gnarled looking red onions from the garden.

She cleared her throat, approaching cautiously. “Mrs. Grant? Mr. Olsen said you wanted to see me.”

Mrs. Grant scarcely looked over her shoulder. “Yes, Kara. Could you come over here and help me chop these onions? I want to get them in vinegar before the day is done.”

Kara nodded. She sounded oddly pensive, and not at all like the more opinionated woman she had come to know.

After a period of silence in which Kara set herself up with a cutting board and her own bunch of onions, Mrs. Grant finally spoke up. “It seems you and Ms. Luthor have been getting along rather well.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“I saw you come out of her room rather late last night looking flushed.”

Kara squeaked and her knife faltered, almost slicing her finger clear down the middle. “Be careful child, my goodness! You’re going to lose a damn finger. Put that knife down and listen to me.”

Kara did as she was told. “I know you’ve grown quite fond of Ms. Luthor but I want you to be careful, Ms. Danvers, about what you get yourself into.”

“I don’t think Ms. Luthor is going to hurt me, Mrs. Grant, we’re friends--”

“Has she ever told you what happened to Mrs. Luthor?”

“She had a stroke, of course.”

“But has she ever told you what happened to _before_ she had the stroke.”

Kara was stunned into a subdued silence that seemed to tell Mrs. Grant everything she needed to know. “Listen to me very carefully. You think you know what’s happening here, but you don’t. You haven’t a clue. There are more secrets in this house than you could possibly imagine.”

Lips pursed, Kara felt a flustered heat creep up the back of her neck. She pushed the cutting board away from herself and turned on her heel, leaving the kitchen without saying another word to Mrs. Grant. She was acutely aware of the breach of decorum but couldn’t bring herself to care. All she could think of was the look on Lena’s face last night, how sincere she had seemed. She didn’t expect Lena to tell her _everything,_ but--

“Oof!” Lost in her thoughts, Kara was brought to a sudden stop by a broad chest. She looked up to see James staring down at her, bemused. “I’m so sorry, I was all tangled up in my head just then--”

“It’s alright.” James and Hank seemed to have finished with the bannister--it was upright again, and Hank was nowhere to be found. “Mrs. Grant got you flustered?”

Kara huffed. “You were right earlier--she seems really worked up about something. I just can’t imagine missing food in the pantry would get a person in such a tizzy.”

“She’s superstitious.” James shrugged one shoulder. “Lots of people in this house are. You may as well get used to it now.”

“I’m not sure what you mean?”

The man in front of her furrowed his brow as if he wasn’t sure what _she_ meant, the corners of his mouth twitching down slightly. “Well, you do know what happened,” He dropped his voice an octave. “To Mr. Luthor, don’t you?”

“Of course, after what he did, all the townspeople ran him into the forest, and he died there. He would have never been able to get out alive.”

James crossed his arms. “So they say.”

“Stop pulling my leg, James. I’m too old to fall for ghost stories. You’re really trying to tell me that Lex Luthor is alive in those woods and creeping into this house at night to steal food from the pantry?”

“I’m not saying anything. I’m just telling you what some people in this house have come to believe.”

“Well, just because some people in this house have woods fever doesn’t make it true. You’re worse than my older sister with this,” Kara waved a single hand in the air as if grabbing around for the right word. “This _nonsense_.”

“We all believe what we want to believe. Give it a few more weeks, you never know, you might just catch yourself _woods fever_ as well.” He sucked his teeth and picked his knapsack of tools from the base of the stairs, slinging it over his shoulder. “It’s about time I retired. Good night, Ms. Danvers.”

Kara rolled her eyes as she watched him leave. Some people would really believe anything.

* * *

 

After undressing, Kara stood in the stillness of her room looking out at the drawn curtains of her window. James was being quite silly, Lex Luthor was _dead,_ he had done a horrible thing and gotten his comeuppance for it. There was no way a boy raised in the city could survive out in the taiga for so long, he would have been taken apart by wolves--

Just then, from below, distinct from the ambient noise of the house settling, there was a distinct and punctuating _thump_ coming somewhere from the direction of the kitchen. Kara dove headfirst into bed, naked as the day she was born, her heart hammering so fast in her heart she felt lightheaded.

Maybe it was time to take some of those vacation days she was promised.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


	3. Chapter 3

The next morning, Kara felt in a fog as she readied Mrs. Luthor for the day ahead. As was her ritual, she dressed her, brushed her hair and did her face as if she had a full schedule of things to do and people to see. Even in her strange mood Kara chattered along, hoping to keep Lillian entertained. She couldn’t imagine what a bore it would be to be suddenly trapped inside yourself, day in and day out, without a single person to talk to. Kara hadn’t known Mrs. Luthor personally before her illness, but she had often tried to suss out good qualities from her conversations with Lena. Qualities aside from cold, and miserly, and xenophobic.

“Well,” Lena said one morning over breakfast, tapping her cigarette into a saucer. She peered at her mother wearily out of the corner of her eye. “She was an avid reader, and she liked science and medicine. She had a good head for business too, better than Lex or my father ever did.”

Kara from thenceforth tried to brush up a little on her reading and knowledge of science. What she did know already concerned mostly agriculture (like that cows had 3 stomachs--did Lena know that? She made a mental note to mention it in a future letter) and she had exhausted that within a few weeks of being there. Unable to cope with the almost oppressive silence and with a desire to be a good companion to Mrs. Luthor, despite who she may have been as a person before her accident, she found herself in the large reading room at Idlewild.

Most of it was in English and reached far beyond her grasp of the language, but she was surprised to find a few German translations (another mental note--ask Lena whom in her family spoke German), almost always of the classics like Shakespeare and some medical texts by John Cooke. This was a pleasant surprise, she loved reading as a girl but found that the Danvers had different priorities. They were very much a work-oriented group, although Eliza was gifted at sums and seemed to always have a real eye for the way things worked on the inside. Alex shared the same knack but always enjoyed a good tumble out in the yard rather than settling down with a novel.

On her 16th birthday, the year before Jeremiah died, they had gifted her with a German translation of Wuthering Heights. It was a precious thing, one that must have cost several weeks of Jeremiah’s salary and a lengthy trip to Montreal to buy, and to that day it remained the only book that Kara owned other than her family bible. Alex tried on several occasions to teach her to read in English, but she could never quite grasp it in the same way that speaking came easy to her.

But here, there were two shelves dedicated to German reading, and Kara had even begun to take books up to her bedroom to read before sleeping with Mr. Henshaw’s approval. It was about this knowledge that she spoke with Mrs. Luthor, hoping that if there were any part of her left understanding that she would appreciate what Kara nattered on about.

“You know,” she said, taking Lillian’s hair into her hands and brushing it out. “The ancient Greeks have a name for what happened to you. It’s called apoplexy, and it means struck down with violence.” Kara paused, creasing her brow. “Is that what it felt like, was it violent-seeming?”

There was no response, as was typical. Kara resumed her work and brought Lillian to the breakfast table which would be missing her daughter that day. She had tried not to dwell on Lena’s leaving, but had been failing on every front. Her conversation with Mrs. Grant the evening before had caused quite a stir in her. Kara couldn’t quite decipher the double meaning behind what she’d been saying, but she knew without a doubt that there was one, as Mrs. Grant very rarely ever spoke of surface-level matters.

When a servant brought their breakfasts, Kara looked dumbly into her beige cup of coffee. “Eugénie?” She called the woman back hesitantly. “Would you mind making me a fresh cup of coffee, but black this time?”

Eugénie's face tipped into a frown as she took Kara’s cup away. “But you always have your coffee like this, Miss.”

“I’m only feeling like a little change this morning.”

“So black, just how Miss Luthor takes it? I guess she’s rubbing off on you, huh?” She shrugged and disappeared back into the kitchen without another word, reemerging some minutes later with a fresh cup of pitch-black coffee. The singular smell of it put Kara more at ease. “By the way, Miss.” Eugénie called as she turned to exit the room “Mrs. Grant says she has some mail for you in the kitchen.”

Kara felt her heart speed up. It wasn’t possible that it was from Lena, of course. She likely wouldn’t even arrive in Labrador until later this evening, let alone have enough time to write and post Kara a letter. It may be even as much as a week before she got correspondence from her strange friend. All the same, she felt herself grow hot with anticipation at the thought of it.

Finishing her breakfast in a hurry, Kara left Mrs. Luthor in the breakfast nook with Eugénie as she went to collect the day’s mail. The letter was from Alex, of course, and she tucked it into the folds of her dress before softly retreating back to Lillian. She had a whole day to navigate through before she would have time to sit down and read it.

***

That evening, Kara put Lillian to bed and retired earlier than usual. On days that she received letters, she liked to lock herself into her room as opposed to nattering on with the other house workers in the kitchen or taking a lesson with Mrs. Grant. She wanted to take her time with the things that people wrote to her, and with her responses, and if the letters made her feel too homesick she might even open her bible and read through a few passages for the simple comfort of it.

Night was continuing to fall quicker and quicker, and by the time Kara reached her quarters it was dark enough for her to light two lamps besides to the stoked fire in her fireplace. After dressing down for bed, she pulled her robe closer around her body and moved to her writing desk, setting out the letters she received, her pen, paper, and a lamp in a ritualistic fashion. Alex’s letter sat on top of the stack, looking thicker than usual. She opened it and prised out the stack of papers within.

As she scanned the text, Kara’s heart began to speed up. Tucked in alongside the minutiae of her day was something very vexing.

[ _...] He proposed, and I said no, and I know you will find this stuff extremely disappointing but I beg you to remember there are things that you still don’t understand about our situation. I know Ma will be writing to you to try and change my mind, but please leave me be and try to be happy for me in the choice I’ve made._

Kara frowned. What on earth was Alex talking about? This was the second time in less than two days that somebody had told her she didn’t understand something, and she felt tired of it. For a moment she set the letter down and made up half a mind not to read or respond to it. It didn’t come to pass, of course, and she found herself picking the letter back up minutes later. What Kara couldn’t understand is why everybody seemed to hell-bent on treating her like a child, incapable of handling the truth of things. For a feverish moment she considered writing to Lena, but she tucked the thought aside as quickly as it came. For all her grousing, she had to admit that there were things that she didn’t understand even about herself.

***

Two things happened in tandem the following week; more food went missing from the pantry, and Lena’s first letter arrived at the house.

Mrs. Grant was in such a tiff over the food that Kara couldn’t suss out how upset she was about Lena sending her mail. She left breakfast to get her post from the kitchen by Eugénie as usual and found the older woman both tending a simmering pot and supervising James as he installed new locks in the food pantry.

“What’s this?” Kara asked mildly, picking up a stack of letters with her name on them and flicking through one by one. She swallowed when she came to the one with Lena Luthor scrawled in the return address, but tried not to betray anything her face. The letter was posted in a fine, thick envelope with a small, rectangular parcel attached.

“More thieves.” Huffed Mrs. Grant. “We had the locksmith come early this morning and make new locks for the pantry that only I will have access too.”

“But Ma’am,” Piped Eugénie, “How will the rest of us get food from the pantry when you’re not around?”

“You’ll have to come ask my permission.” Mrs. Grant groused, turning her full attention back to the stew on the stove. “I will not abide by thieves in my home, Ms. Thibeau. The locks stay on until somebody comes forward.” She finished her sentence with relish that implied no more room for conversation on the subject. Eugénie sulked for a moment and, finding that there were no letters for her, moved to the adjacent laundry room to finish that day’s washing. “Such a mousy girl.” Kara heard Mrs. Grant whisper under her breath after Eugénie had left. She decided it was best not to comment. After all, the already testy woman was in a grumpier mood than usual, and Kara knew that she had seen the letter that Lena wrote to her. It was better not to stir the pot any more than it already was.

As it were, Mrs. Luthor was also in a state that day. Kara couldn’t put her finger on it, but she had been acting as if something were amiss ever since Lena had left, refusing to eat. It also seemed as if she hadn’t slept a wink in a week. She would often nod off while Kara read to her in the drawing room, only to blink awake moments later looking groggy. On this particular day, as Kara dutifully read from Romeo and Juliet, she watched out of the corner of her eye as Lillian’s head drooped progressively inward toward her chest. The older woman drifted out, chin to sternum, her eyes fluttering until they finally fell closed and her bosom began to lift in deep, even breaths.

Kara made a few halfhearted attempts to continue reading, but her right hand continued to brush across the parcel tucked away in the folds of her dress. It was weighty, substantial, the envelope holding a few pages at least in addition to whatever Lena had sent her from Labrador. She looked over again to see if Lillian was asleep--and she was, it seemed. Kara had the thought that it couldn’t hurt to skim the letter and open the parcel. It would help her concentration for the rest of the day. And anyway, her voice was getting a little hoarse from all that reading.

Mind made up, she shut the tome on her lap and set it aside, producing the letter and parcel and tearing into it inelegantly. Under the twine and wax-paper wrap there was a fine bar of chocolate--by the looks of the packaging it was French. She brought the bar to her nose and inhaled . It smelled fresh, sweet, and a little citrusy, the kind of thing Kara would have gobbled up in an instant as a child without regard for quality.

Next came the letter, which Kara opened and spread out on her lap with great ceremony. By the time she read the first line, her idea of skimming the letter was forgotten.

_Kara,_

_I hope you will forgive this letter for arriving so late, the ride to Labrador was boorishly long, and I’ve been busy with the union men sunrise to sunset for the last day and a half. I’ll try my best to make an account here and hope it won’t put you to sleep._

Kara read through the rest of the letter, not pausing, and resting each page face down on the couch as she finished with it. In the text, Lena described the dreary work of rallying the morale of the men at the Luthor logging camp in Labrador and negotiating with the union leaders for a deal that would benefit them both. Despite Lena’s fears, Kara found the letter exhilarating, and the day-to-day workings of Lena’s trip were of great interest. In what felt like no time at all, Kara reached the last page and let her eyes, then the tips of her fingers, drift to the final sentences in Lena’s missive.

_As I said, I’ve been busy all week--but I’ve been thinking of you Kara, all the time, and hoping that you think of me too. Is this foolish? The chocolate reminded me of your fondness for oranges (it’s made, I’m lead to believe, with candied orange peels from the south of France)._

_Now I think I’ve made a fool of myself. I still hope that you will write to soon. I hope to be back and in your company in little more than a fortnight._

_Yours,_

_Lena_

Kara sucked in a deep breath and pulled the page to her chest. She could feel her heart almost thundering out of her ribcage. Kara didn’t consider herself the kind of girl to swoon over letters. She had more than once seen Eugénie and Julia squawk after opening a letter from their beaus, and even James might be found occasionally sitting in the stairwell with a missive from Lucy and color on his cheeks, and wondered what was going on in their heads.

So caught up was she in Lena’s letter that she hadn’t paid any attention at all to Mrs. Luthor. It was only after she had packed up the letter in it’s envelope and tucked it with the bar of chocolate back into the folds of her dress that she happened to glance over and catch her charge’s eye.

Lillian stared back at her, wide awake, gaze hot and brimming with something Kara didn’t quite know.

***

_Dear Lena,_

_Did you know that cows have three stomachs?_

Kara paused and set her pen down, reaching to open the drawer of her desk. She rifled around in her drawer for a moment before producing a daguerreotype of herself and Alex posed in front of a backdrop she had painted herself. She smiled inwardly and tucked it into the already addressed envelope before beginning to write again in earnest.

***  
 _Darling,_

_Thank you for the picture. Your mother is a talented photographer and she’s captured yours and your sister’s essence well. You look stunning, and very regal, although I much prefer to see you in person. I didn’t know cows have three stomachs, and I beg of you to tell me more…_

  
***

_Who in your family speaks German? I’m curious about your collection of books, I have enjoyed them greatly, mostly the ones written by William Shakespear(e) (?) and the ones about medicine. Which did you like to read, when you were little? Will you show them to me when you come home? I miss you terribly._

***

_My father spoke many languages before he died, and if you like those I will bring you more. I confess you’re all I think of lately. Anything you want, I’m sure I can procure for you._

***

Once the letters started to come, they came often. Kara received 6 or 7 over a period of two weeks, the last promising that Lena would be home in a matter of days and that her business at the mill was nearly done. Kara sighed when she read it, tossing it down on her desk with flourish and relaxing back into her chair. It was another unseasonably cold night and a pelt of slush hit against her windowpane with a ferocity that was strange for this early in the season. If she were to look out she could scarcely see the gardens or the trees below. She’d long since traded in her thin, flimsy robe for a heavier flannel one, although nothing could be done for the thinness of her shimmie underneath.

A couple days wasn’t such a long wait, and the lord knew that she would have enough to keep herself occupied between Mrs. Grant’s increasingly stormy moods and Mrs. Luthor’s recent stubborn streak. In the midst of her thoughts her stomach grumbled; perhaps most of all she had missed her midnight snacks with Lena in the kitchen.

Without thinking too much of it, she grabbed her lamp off the desk and exited her bedroom as quietly as she could. The house was, as usual, impenetrably silent, and she felt as though every step she took echoed like a thunderclap. Her lamp cast frightful shadows up on the wall and she startled herself every time she saw her own distorted figure thrown against the opposing surface. The ghastliness of it unnerved her, but she pressed on, reasoning that James’s ridiculous ghost stories had only buried themselves into her subconscious.

By the time she reached the door that lead to the kitchen staircase there was unease set deep in her bones. She opened it regardless. Kara Danvers was many things, but a superstitious chicken was not one of them. In front of her, the staircase, looking steeper than it ever had before, descended into the darkness below. Gulping, Kara began to walk down.

She’d scarcely taken two steps when there was a rustling somewhere in the abyss below. Heart hammering, but assuming she was hearing things, Kara took several more steps down until she could see the concrete floor of the kitchen. Kara paused for a moment, gathered her bearings and chastised herself for how silly she’d been, letting those stupid stories get to her.

Just then, there was a loud crash like a cabinet slamming shut and a pair of feet dashing across the illuminated section of floor. Kara screamed, pitching back and nearly dropping her lamp as she collapsed onto the stairs. There was immediate commotion in the upper levels and as she lay panting, lamp clutched in her had, the upper door swung open, multiple pairs of feet clambering down.

“Mrs. Danvers!” Cat Grant’s voice was shrill. Kara looked over her shoulder and saw her poised, robe clutched, with James standing behind her and Eugénie behind James, holding a trowel above her head ready to strike. All were in some variation of their bedclothes. “What is the meaning of this?”

“There was, I saw—“ Kara tried her best to reign in her shaky voice. She pointed into the still-dark unknown with her finger. “Down there. A person.”

The posse, sans Eugénie, moved past Kara’s prostrate body and into the kitchen. Kara saw Mrs. Grant lighting other lamps while James moved around, checking every different cranny he could find. When he reached the pantry the door was ajar, lock broken, food missing. Mrs. Grant swore under her breath.

The four of them moved into the adjacent laundry room together and immediately feel a gust of chilly air. Above them, the small, solitary window was busted open, letting in the night air. Mrs. Grant cursed again as James slammed the window shut, going to flick the lock but finding that it too had been busted.

“At least we know it wasn’t a ghost.” Eugénie whispered, earning a cutting look from Mrs. Grant.

“A thief is more like it.” James groused.

“Ms. Thibeau.” She began. “Please take Ms. Danvers upstairs and have her settle in your room for the night. She can have Julia’s bed while she’s gone with Ms. Luthor. Me and Mr. Olsen have some things to discuss.”

“But Mrs. Grant—“ Eugénie’s displeased foot stomp was cut off with another withering look. Kara wanted to protest on her behalf, but she was petrified, and the thought of sleeping alone in her bedroom was untenable. She would rather pitch a tent on Cat Grant’s floor then return to her solitary bed. “As you wish.” She turned to Kara, still standing huddled behind them, and beckoned her up the stairs.

Eugénie and Julia’s room was adjacent to Lena’s and larger than Kara’s, if only by a hair. There were two double beds so close they were almost touching, a writing desk, and not much else to speak of. One bed was mussed, the other perfectly made. Eugénie gestured to the latter. “You can sleep there.” She mumbled, shedding her robe and crawling under her sheets. Kara wondered at how she could be so calm under the circumstances.

Through an unspoken agreement, they didn’t blow out the lantern immediately. Eugénie laid on her side, facing Kara, head rested on her hand. “Not scared, are you?”

Kara looked blankly up at the ceiling. “No, are you?”

“No.”

Downstairs, somebody shuffled about and they both jumped. “You shouldn’t worry, anyway.” Eugénie bit out once they’d settled. “Your protector Ms. Luthor will be back any day now.”

Kara rolled over. “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

Eugénie’s eyebrows rose. “Don’t play stupid. We’ve all heard about you going downstairs with her at night.”

“Gossips.”

“Maybe.” She allowed, then, “You do know, don’t you? That Ms. Luthor is that way? I would be careful if I were you...the stories Julia tells—“

“What way?” Kara interrupted her. “What way do you mean?”

“You know.” Eugénie rolled her eyes. “An invert.”

“A what?”

Beleaguered, Eugénie bit out something rude-sounding in French and isolated her pointer and middle finger up in a V-formation, flicking her tongue between them. Although she didn’t quite understand, Kara winced anyway. It was crude-feeling.

“I see.” Kara said. She didn’t. But she didn’t want to seem any stupider in front of Eugénie than she already did.

“I’m telling you for your own good, so don’t look so sour.” Eugénie advised, rolling over to blow out the lantern. “You seem nice enough and I don’t want you to end up like the last one. That being said, if you’re not so scared tomorrow, maybe you can sleep in your own bed.”

***

Kara stayed in Julia’s bed for the three days it took for Lena’s return. She tried once to retire to her own room, but the settling of the house had become sinister after the events of the previous night and she returned frightened to the comfort of Julia’s sheets. Eugénie said nothing and at best tolerated her presence in the room.

Lena’s arrival was met with the usual fanfare, despite its relatively late hour. Every servant, including Kara, gathered in the foyer when her carriage arrived. Kara could feel Lena’s gaze fixed on her as she curtsied, stuck in a paradoxical realm between hoping that nobody noticed her being singled out and relishing in the attentions.

Rising, Kara noted Lena paused off to the side talking about something in a low tone with Mrs. Grant. Julia and Mr. Henshaw had spirited upstairs with her luggage, and the other housekeepers were long dispersed and back about their evenings. Kara remained in the foyer, just to the left of Mrs. Luthor, waiting for some kind of direction. Lena looked haggard, perhaps both from her long day of travel and whatever it was that Mrs. Grant was telling her—Kara assumed it was about the previous night, based on the stern set of her brow.

“Ms. Danvers.” Lena’s voice coaxed her back into the present and she straightened up, nodding. Her words were formal but her eyes were soft. “Has my mother eaten dinner yet?”

“Yes’m.” Kara mumbled. They’d sat down for supper hours earlier.

“Well, I’m famished.” Lena commented, beginning to remove her gloves, finger by finger. “Could you take her to bed and then bring me my dinner to the study?”

“Ms. Luthor,” Mrs. Grant began, “I’m sure Ms. Martin or Ms. Thibeau would be happy to bring you something if you’re hungry.”

Lena eyed her askance. “Julia has had a long month and a long day, as has Ms. Thibeau. They can have the night off, unless Kara has something better to be doing?”

Kara muttered no, miss and tried her best not to meet Mrs. Grant’s gaze. She heard Lena’s hands clap together. “Perfect, it’s settled then. I will see Ms. Danvers in the study in a half an hour.”

Kara had to remind herself to slow down as she gave Mrs. Luthor a bath and readied her for bed. Mrs. Grant had nothing to say to her when she arrived in the kitchen to collect Lena’s tray, and she assumed she’d gotten a talking to after Kara’s departure. There were two plates on the tray, one with a full meal and another with various dessert items. Kara knew full well that Lena never ate dessert. Mrs. Grant said nothing of that, either.

The door to the study was ajar when Kara arrived and she pushed it open with her foot. She found Lena sitting next to a roaring fire, glass of wine in hand, and a large burlap bag next to her. For a moment Kara stuttered, trying to negotiate how to curtsy with her hands full, but she was stopped by the sound of Lena’s laughter.

“You mustn't worry about that, Kara. Bring the tray over here.” Kara did as she was asked, setting down the food and placing herself on the chair catty-corner to Lena’s. Seeing the other woman for the first time on their own made Kara’s hands tremble with nervous excitement. She hadn’t forgot the look of her while she was away, but she was so much better in the flesh. “I’m glad to see you again.” Lena murmured, moving the food on the plate around with her fork.

“I’m glad to see you too.” Kara said in a voice that edged on becoming a whisper. Her gaze drifted beyond Lena to the bag at her feet. “What’s that?”

“Oh. Here, open it—and eat those, please. I hope you know I didn’t ask for eclairs for myself.”

“Lena, my goodness, there are almost 16 books in here. Where did you find them all?” When she looked up, Lena was smiling smugly, probably proud of herself. Happiness made her features even more handsome than they already were.

“There’s a rare books dealer in Labrador. I shook him down for everything he had. I hope you’ll find them to your liking.”

“I’m sure I will.” Sighed Kara as she ran her hand over the delicate spine of one of the books. She’d never seen such a bounty in her entire life, and every single one of them in German.

“There’s also a catalogue in there, you can request a translated copy of a book and they’ll find it or have it done themselves.”

“Have it done themselves!” Kara squeaked. “That’s too much, I think.”

“Nonsense.” When she looked up, Lena was holding her gaze quite intensely. “There’s no reason for you to want for anything, Kara, if I can provide it for you.” Kara swallowed and set down the book in her lap, taking an oversized bite of eclaire to give herself time to think of something to respond. Lena continued before she was finished chewing. “I’m sure you heard Mrs. Grant talking to me about the—situation in the kitchen.”

“I didn’t hear, exactly, but I saw.” Kara said, finishing the eclaire in another large bite and moving on to another.

“Yes, well.” Lena coughed delicately and folded her hands in her lap. She appeared to be picking at something on her thumbnail. “You’re obviously no prisoner here, Kara, and you’re free to come and go from your quarters as you like. However,” Her eyes lifted up and she gazed across the limited space between them. “In the future, perhaps consider not going downstairs at night without an escort.”

Kara frowned. “Is there something wrong?”

“No, no, nothing out of the ordinary.” Lena shook her head. “When you live this far out, occasionally you get thieves. It’s part of the territory. It’s no danger, of course, Cat Grant would wollop any burglar with her tea kettle before she let them steal or harm another person in the house.” Kara chucked at that. “But for your own safety. Until Mr. Olsen can reinforce the windows.”

“Perhaps you’re right.” Kara agreed through a mouthful of sweet. Lena cleared her throat again, spearing a potato on her fork before using the edge of the plate to carefully slide it off.

“I was actually thinking,” Under Kara’s curious gaze she shifted. “That perhaps you’d like to stay with me, in my room until we fix the downstairs window. Mrs. Grant said that you were frightened. And I would think it’s better to keep you close to me for the time being.”

Kara liked the idea of being kept close very much. Enough, in fact that she set aside Eugénie’s previous warning for the time being and simply smiled eagerly back, nodding her head.

  
***

“Come in, please.” Lena’s room was as grand as she remembered it, all dark oak furnishings, gauzy curtains and crown moulding. Her bed was enormous and softly lit by a lamp resting on a side table, a book carelessly discarded somewhere therein. The blankets on top were soft-looking and multitudinous. Her eager agreement earlier suddenly felt somewhat foolish—she was nervous. “You can get in the bed, I won’t make you sleep on the floor.”

“You don’t think it’s untoward?” Lena shook her head and shimmied beneath her bedding, pulling them up to her waist. Kara gulped.

“It’s my home, so I suppose it doesn’t really matter.”

Slowly, heart thumping, Kara shifted into bed next to her. It was just as soft as it looked, almost softer somehow. Large as the bed was, they ended up near each other in the middle, each turned on their sides and facing one another. “What book are you going to read first?”

“I think I like the one about the stupid humans and the boy with the donkey’s head.”

“Much Ado About Nothing.”

“Mm. In German, it’s Viel Lärm um Nichts.”

Smiling, eyes twinkling and sleepy, Lena said nothing more. Licking her lips, Kara continued. “Before you came back, I shared a room with Eugénie.”

“Oh. I don’t like to speak ill of those in my employ, but Ms. Thibeau is a bit simple. I’m sure that couldn’t have been enjoyable.”

“Well, no.” Kara agreed. “And she said something odd about you, on the first night when we were together.”

“Did she.” Lena didn’t look surprised or perturbed, but rather relaxed.

“She said…” Wetting her lips again, Kara pressed on. “She said you’re an invert, but I don’t know exactly what that means.”

This, of all things, took Lena off guard, and Kara nearly regretted saying it. The other woman pinkened and scratched at her cheek, brow furrowed. Gone was the relaxed expression of a few moments ago. Her dark green eyes searched Kara’s face, as if for some clue of how to proceed. “And you don’t know what that means?”

“I haven’t a clue.” Kara admitted breathlessly, although she was beginning to get an idea of it.

“It means—“ Lena’s eyes chanced a glance at the ceiling as if she had notes written there, before returning to Kara’s face. “You know how a man and a woman will be intimate with each other, sometimes, if they like?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Some women and some men prefer to only be intimate with their own sex.” Lena admitted quietly. Kara blinked at her, dumbstruck. “That’s what we call an invert.”

Kara opened her mouth and snapped it shut. It wasn’t the most out of the ordinary thing she’d heard, given the ghosts and all, but it existed somewhere beyond the pale. She thought back to her dreams, the curious heat in her when Lena would catch her eye across the table. She’d chalked them up to the aberrant desires that seemed pervasive and altogether harmless once you passed thirteen or so, as long as you didn’t really act on them, like when Mr. Hamilton was caught in the barn with one of his sheep. “You mean intimate, like when they go to make make babies.”

Lena laughed at that, but it sounded short and distressed. “It’s not always so you can make a baby. Sometimes people do it for fun, too.”

“Well, I know that,” Kara balked, indignant. She’d done it enough times to herself to be aware of exactly how fun it could be, although her interactions with others remained scarce. Her experience on the subject amounted to seeing livestock do it on the farm, Winn showing her his thing once on a nasty dare, some dirty photographs, and a few heated kisses shared with suitors. She also realized that there was one rather large question between them so far unasked. “So are you? Like that, I mean?”

Lena blinked once. “Yes.” It felt as though her words sucked all of the air out of the room at once. Kara huffed out something unintelligible, rolled over on her back for a moment, pivoted to look at Lena again, then flopped for a second time onto her back. Lena, for her part, remained looking impassive, her only tell being the thinness of her lips as she sucked them into her mouth.

“And you’ve been with other women before?” Kara was still staring up at the ceiling, body flushed with excitement at the prospect of Lena’s answer.

“Yes.” Lena responded evenly.

“Wow.” Kara tried to say something else but couldn’t find the words. She settled for muttering wow again, to Lena’s apparent amusement. Her whole body was vibrating, she felt like she could get up and run 10 laps around the house before she’d be ready to sleep. Alex, her main purveyor of worldly gossip, had failed to mention this morsel of humanity to her, and it felt like a huge omission in the scope of things. “Wait, I have another question.”

“Go ahead.”

“When Eugénie told me this, she also made this gesture like—“ She repeated the gesture to the best of her memory, middle and pointer fingers up, tongue out. Lena’s ensuing expression was shocked. “What’s that mean?”

Lena hesitated, but explained it all the same, in slow, halting verbiage. By the end of it, Kara was standing next to the bed, shimmie hanging almost all the way open in the front, hands on hips. Her face was red and crumpled. “You’re yanking my chain, now.”

“I’m not. Come back to bed, please, you’re going to wake the whole house.”

“People do that?” Kara asked in a high-pitched voice as she acquiesced, crawling back between the sheets. “You’ve done it?”

“Yes.” Lena’s voice was lower than it was before and had taken on a honey-like quality that reverberated somewhere deep in Kara’s stomach. Suddenly all too aware of their proximity and the relative little that separated their earthly bodies, Kara trembled. She thought about the previous night when she’d rubbed herself over thinking about the women who was currently inches away from her face breathing heavily. Surely that didn’t make her like that, not all on its own.

“And did you like it?” Kara was beginning to understand the plight of young boys who would get themselves started at the littlest things. The question was charged and she knew it. Even the idea of Lena enjoying a bite of food or a good book was suddenly taking on an erotic dimension, let alone doing the things she’d described a few moments before.

“Yes, Kara.” In Lena’s recent tradition of saying very little, and being apparently ignorant to the effect her words would have on Kara, she continued with: “I liked it very much. Aren’t you tired yet? It’s late.”

“Not really. I still have a lot of questions.”

“Well, can you save them for tomorrow, then?” Lena’s eyes were dark, searching, then torn away as she rolled over to blow out the lamp and plunge the bedroom into complete darkness. She stayed rolled onto her opposite side, and eventually her breath began to even out. This was before Kara could lodge an appropriate protest, say that she wasn’t ready to sleep, not yet. She still had curiosities that she hoped Lena would be willing to help her answer, it would likely be easier than trying to learn it all from books.

Deciding to try sleep herself, Kara shut her eyes and went through the basic motions. She evened her breath, tried to focus on the mundanities of the environment around her; the weight of the blankets on her body, the occasional scraping of tree branches on the windowpane, Lena’s warmth radiating outward. She hummed, focusing in on the latter keenly, thought of how nice it would be if Lena were closer to her, pressed against her side or even on top of her.

Kara’s eyes snapped open and she clutched reflexively at the blankets, looking sideways at the figure next to her. She had a thousand more questions explode into existence at once and she tried with mixed success to tuck each carefully away until morning


	4. Chapter 4

Eugénie got wise quickly enough that Kara had to wonder if she couldn’t smell it on her like a dog might. As careful as she was, as quiet her steps as she returned to her room in the pre-dawn winter light, as much as she avoided looking at Lena during the daytime, it became apparent that the secret wasn’t a secret any longer. Eugénie looked at her sidelong while serving meals, glanced pointedly while she whispered with Julia, and made one overt comment as they pulled laundry over a washing board in the basement. They were both gifted enough in small talk that their shared work could go by with relative ease, but there were cracks in the facade that vitriol could so easily slip through. Especially during the hard-work days, the days when there was nothing to do but break your knees and crack your knuckles over the wash-basin. It had a way of ebbing at politeness like acid.

“It has been chilly. Although I don’t suppose you notice, all shacked up with the mistress as you are. Her rooms must be very warm indeed.”

“Shut up, Eugénie.” Kara hissed, not looking at her. Her knees were aching from kneeling on the concrete floor and her fingers were pruned and cracked from the soapy water. “You don’t know anything.”

But she did know something, and it made Kara wonder exactly how many other people in the house knew as well. Julia, certainly, but nobody else had been as bold in their suspicions as they had. None of this, of course, stopped Kara’s nightly migration from her own chambers to Lena’s, and Kara found herself uncertain that anything ever could.

The harvest celebrations came and passed, Kara received a letter from Alex detailing the feast that Eliza had prepared (turkey and yams and potatoes, Maggie herself foraged for the cranberry jelly, and wasn’t she such a dear?) and wrote her own in return about the meal at the Luthor’s (a strange and quiet affair, but with so much food you could scarcely believe your own two eyes). Nothing more was mentioned of Winn and his failed proposal, and Kara wasn’t about to bring it up. They talked in vague terms of her return for Christmas, and she supposed she’d see for herself at that time.

But there was something altogether strange added near the end of the letter, something almost certainly meant as an off-handed aside. The extra $50, Alex wrote, was entirely too much but appreciated all the same. Kara set the letter down in wonderment. Extra 50 dollars–she made barely 20 a month, with Alex and Eliza receiving 18 of it by post. Where on earth did Alex think she got 50 dollars from? And furthermore, where had it come from?

Of course, the pool of people who could post a large sum of money from her current address was a small one. She spent the afternoon either stewing on the supposed identity and fretting over Mrs. Luthor, who’d taken on a wan appearance in recent weeks. She’d barely eaten and spent so much of the day asleep that Kara wondered if it was worth it to get her out of bed at all. When she was awake, there was a distinct skittishness about her—she’d sometimes fix her gaze right over Kara’s shoulder with an expression that Kara would swear was fear.

Kara soldiered on and tried to keep her routine as normal as possible, despite her suspicion that Mrs. Luthor should be brought to a doctor. And perhaps it was the money issue that finally persuaded her to address Mrs. Luthor’s state of health with her mistress as well. Kara dwelled as she knocked several times on the door to Lena’s office.

“Ms. Danvers!” Julia hissed. She was stationed in front of Lena’s office door, mending a dress. “Ms. Luthor is not to be disturbed while she’s working.”

Kara opened her mouth to retort when the door swung open. Lena, standing well-postured in a red dress with her hair done up, didn’t seem altogether happy or unhappy to see her at first blush.

“It’s fine, Ms. Martin.” She said mildly. “Ms. Danvers can come in if she has something to address with me. I presume about my mother?”

“Yes ma’am.” In the background, Julia gaped. Lena stepped aside and gestured for Kara to enter, which she did, but not before throwing a haughty look over her shoulder at Julia. The woman scowled.

Once the door was closed, Lena’s entire demeanor changed. She smiled at Kara and pulled the chair on the other side of her desk out for her. When she sat, she leaned forward and set the papers in front of her aside, showing Kara her undivided attention--a rare gift. However, Kara’s frown remained fixed on her face and Lena’s energy dipped somewhat seeing it. “Is something the matter, Kara?”

“Yes.” Kara huffed. “I think your mother is ill.”

“Oh.” Lena’s eyebrows shot up. She looked genuinely alarmed as she reached for her pen and a piece of paper to make a note. “Well, I’ll send for the doctor right away. Is she feverish?”

“No. She’s been losing weight. Looking downright ghastly.”

Lena nodded and rang the bell for Julia, still grousing as she stepped in. Kara could only grow further agitated as they discussed bringing the village doctor by for a house call the following afternoon. That done, Julia turned pointedly toward Kara.

“Shall I show Mrs. Danvers out?”

“No, Ms. Martin. I will escort her when we’re finished.” Julia looked at Kara sidelong as she curtsied, a thing Kara could feel as physically as if she’d slapped her face. She exited, closing the door behind her. “Is there something else on your mind, Kara?”

There was, of course, the issue of the money. But there was another, deeper root to Kara’s frustration simmering under the surface. She privately wondered what the point was—she was being ridiculed by the house staff, and increasingly becoming a stranger to her own self, and for what? To indulge her puzzling desire to see Lena Luthor in her chemise? To sleep next to her at night?

And what was the money supposed to be, anyway? Was Lena paying her off? They hadn’t done anything inappropriate, Lena didn’t so much as lay a finger on her while they slept. That on its own was an issue. Kara asked herself whether she really wanted Lena to do something improper, and the answer wasn’t as forthcoming as she’d hoped. In her weaker moments Kara wished that she would make a pass at something if only so she could figure out how she’d react. But, no. Lena Luthor remained stubbornly obeisant.

So, Kara focused on what she could play a hand in. “Have you been sending my family money?”

Lena blinked. “Yes.” She said. “I thought that was understood.”

Kara sputtered. “It was not—understood, as you say. I was very taken off guard to hear it.”

“I don’t understand. Are you upset?”

“I’m confused.”

“About what?” Lena turned her hands up on her desk and opened them. “Is it not enough money?”

“Not enough—Lena, that’s absurd. I’m confused as to why you’re doing it.”

“Your family was very negatively impacted because of my brother.” Lena insisted, ardent. “You lost a father. Of course I would take care of you, after knowing what happened. How could you think I wouldn’t?” Kara sat speechless in her chair. “For as long as I have a say in it, you and your family will not have to worry for money. That is the promise I made to the people who lost loved ones to my brother. That’s the promise I’m making to you, too.”

Kara had often wondered what became of the families of the people who died in the fire. Lex evaded traditional justice only because it was deemed too good for him, and wretching him out of bed to be chased into the taiga and left for dead was likely the final comfort they’d been offered. It seemed silly that Kara didn’t consider the possibility that Lena might be helping those people even years after Lex locked them in a burning warehouse to die. Now that she knew the truth, it seemed obvious, like there was never any other way to consider the situation.

But there remained the question of Lena’s essential goodness. The knowledge of it burned in Kara like a living animal, made her both pleased and angry. At every turn Lena defied the expectations laid out for her, and it only increased the insatiable nature of Kara’s longing. A longing that was as gaping as it was incomprehensible. She’d thought that a few dreams didn’t make her that way, but as the nights in Lena’s bed wore on, she wasn’t as sure as she was in the past. Her dreams were more vivid now, often involving Lena looking up from between her spread legs, mouth engaged.

“Why do you still employ me, then?” She asked, folding her hands into her lap. “If you plan on supporting my family either way.”

“I like to look at you.” Lena responded. “I like to hear you talk. I like it when you’re with me. Of course, if you decided to leave, I wouldn’t stop you. It would have no effect on the amount of money your family received. But I would prefer you to stay.” It was all presented as if Lena were commenting on the weather, or the menu for that night’s dinner. She seemed to not be moved at all by her own sentiments although Kara could scarcely catch her breath as she expressed them. All at once, she had a rapturous desire for Lena to whisper in her ear or to feel hands hot on her skin while she said it, to confess her liking in that way.

“I like you too, Lena.” Kara swallowed harshly. “Very much.” This caused Lena’s eyes to darken a shade. She bit her lip and the corners of her mouth jumped.

“So does that mean I’ll see you tonight?”

“Yes.”

It was never really a question of if she would come, only what would happen when she did. Lena defied that expectation as well, the expectation for her to be deviant, to take what was wanted. Kara wondered, if she did love girls like she said, why she wouldn’t so much as touch her. Did Lena not find her handsome enough? She sniffed at the thought.

***

Kara had a choice made by the time she slipped into Lena’s room the same evening. The warmth of the roaring fire pricked at her skin, the feeling then doubled by the intensity of Lena’s look when her eyes fell to Kara’s body. She was already in bed, blankets pulled under her arms. Her breath quickened when Kara hastily made her way to the spot at her side.

It wasn’t always like this. Sometimes Lena would act blasé as if they were sisters, or husband and wife, and sharing a bed were a usual thing. Other times she would look at Kara with an appetite. To Kara’s estimation, that night was going to fall into the latter category.

“Your hands are cold.” Lena murmured once Kara was settled beside her. She took her companion's hands in her own and held them under the sheets between their bodies. Kara hummed, scooting herself until they were pressed chest to chest under the bedding, their joined hands smashed between their lower bodies. There was so very little separating Kara’s fingers from the skin of Lena’s stomach. The thought sent her heart galloping.

“The house has a terrible draft.” Lena squeezed her fingers, then massaged them. “What are you doing?”

“Helping your blood flow.”

“My feet are chilly too.” Kara took her bare feet and tucked them against Lena’s legs, just above her knee, giggling when the other woman shrieked and tried to pull away. She held her fast by her hands and wriggled her toes, delighting in Lena’s exaggerated response. “Can I keep them here? You’re warm.” She’d wormed them in between Lena’s thighs.

“How am I supposed to get any reading done with you all folded into me like this?”

“Maybe you’ll have to pay attention to me instead.” Kara said cheekily, wriggling a little closer. Lena’s face opened in surprise, but she didn’t make any move to put Kara off. Her body was at once both relaxed and dynamic. If the light weren’t so dim, Kara would probably see a lovely blush creeping up her neck. “Is that really so horrible?”

“No.” Lena admitted in a soft voice. “It’s not so terrible at all.” She seemed suspicious of Kara’s intentions. If Kara were being honest, she was suspicious of them as well. She rested her head on the pillow inches away from Lena’s face, hands and feet still touching her through the gauzy shroud of the chemise. Experimentally, she flexed her fingers over Lena’s stomach and felt the responding shiver, then mimicked it in her own body.

“I’m sorry for being so short with you today.” Kara said, and flexed her fingers again. “I was flustered.”

“Are you feeling better?”

“No.” She wanted to grab Lena’s dress and use it to roll the darker haired woman on top of her. There was a vivid image of it in her head, so much that she could almost feel the delicious weight of Lena’s body covering hers. Kara licked her lips. “Do you remember the first night I stayed in here? What we talked about?” Her hand flattened against Lena’s stomach and skimmed up and over the textured fabric to land squarely between her breasts. Beneath her palm was Lena’s heart hammering, the push and pull of her breath.

Lena rooted to the touch for only a moment before she sat up, eyes wild, as if she’d suddenly realized something. She grabbed at the neckline of her chemise and pulled it together, searching Kara’s face. Kara propped herself on one elbow and let her stare—why not?—the stays at the front of her shift were loose and gaping open, offering a view of the curve of her breast. They were modest, she knew, but Lena’s line of sight was drawn there anyway, even if it was for only the briefest of moments before she crawled to the foot of the bed and peered over.

“My book is down here somewhere—“ The front half of her body was folded over and the back was sticking up. Kara swallowed, eyes tracing the curve of her backside. She begged her voice not to crack over the next few words.

“Do you find me handsome, Lena?”

Lena froze. “What should it matter to you?” She said, emerging and turning to sit with her knees up. “If I find you handsome or not? What should it matter?”

Kara rose from the blankets and sat on her knees, full of too much nervous energy to stay still. “That night you told me some things, but you didn’t tell me everything.” She pitched forward onto her hands and shuffled until she was nearly in Lena’s lap. The bed was enormous, the light was growing dimmer by the minute as the fire burned to embers, and Lena was in front of her looking devastated. Her eyes were wide and flitting between Kara’s eyes and her mouth, her pretty lips were riven and wet. She used the soft coaxing of her hand to relax Lena’s legs and felt a pang of pleasure when the other woman let them fall open without protest.

“What else would you possibly want to know?” Lena asked, voice wavering. When Kara finished parting her legs and began to crawl in between them, her mouth gaped as if to moan but with no sound.

“I want to know everything.”

“I can’t teach you everything.” Lena was trembling.

“I’ve dreamt of you.” Kara pressed her nose and mouth to her cheek and inhaled. She smelled sweet and earthy, like sugar-snap peas fresh from the summer. “Almost every night. Teach me what that means.”

“God.” Lena breathed. Her knees knocked open slightly more and she reclined back onto her elbows, prone. It created an unacceptable chasm between Kara’s touch and her skin. “Kara, I—“

“You have to know.” There was desperation under Kara’s insistence. She clutched at the collar of Lena’s shift in an effort to pull her closer, only succeeding in knocking it askew off one shoulder. Lena remained stubbornly removed from her, even as Kara cupped her face and tried to persuade her forward for a kiss. Just a little one, she reasoned. Her mouth looked so sweet. “What’s the matter? You don’t want to kiss me?”

“I do. So badly, Kara.”

“What is it, then? Girls kiss each other too, don’t they? They have to, they must.” She lobbed forward again, using both hands against Lena’s cheeks to attempt to bring their lips together. Again, she was rebuffed.

“I don’t think you understand what you’re doing.” Lena said. “How could I—how could we, when you don’t know what you want?”

“I know what I want.” Rejected from her attempts at a kiss, she focused on Lena’s exposed shoulder, pulling the collar down further. Lena kept her eyes averted and said nothing as Kara began to make work on her stays. “Lena, look at me.” Already suggestible, they fell apart under her fingers with almost no persuasion and left an open window to her cleavage. From there it was easy, instinctual—Kara barely tugged on the fabric of the sloped side with her fingers and it slid all the way down, exposing Lena’s breast. “Look at me.”

Lena did then, confronting Kara with a challenging look— not that she altogether saw it. Her attention was absorbed by the newly exposed flesh, the hardened peak of Lena’s nipple. It sent an incredible yearning straight to her lower belly. When she did gather herself enough to look at Lena’s face, the expression she saw only stirred her further. It was like being stuck between two extremes; the flint in Lena’s eyes and the creamy skin of her breast. In the end she could only focus on one place, and chose the latter.

With unsteady fingers and an attentive gaze Kara reached between them and stroked Lena’s nipple. It was as if she’d pulled on a marionette’s strings. Lena’s head tipped back, exposing the column of her throat, and she made an undignified noise that Kara felt at her core. Emboldened, Kara moved forward to straddle her hips and press her body closer. She wrapped one arm around Lena’s shoulders, embracing her, and kept the other working on her nipple, twisting and pulling as Lena squirmed underneath her.

“How is it?”

“Good—a little gentler—“

Kara’s fingers softened. “Kiss me, please.” She panted against Lena’s temple. “Haven’t I earned it yet?” When Lena didn’t respond she tugged a little at her nipple, eliciting a squeak from the woman beneath her.

“I think—“ Lena paused, licked her lips. “I think if you really knew—really knew what you were getting into, you wouldn’t do it. You wouldn’t even consider it.”

“But don’t you want it?” Kara choked out. She felt positively desperate, like a caged animal. Her only clear thought was ravaging Lena’s mouth with her own. “Do you feel it like I do?”

“I do—I—“ The assent was enough, and Kara was in no mood for continuing to bicker about what she might and might not understand. Her body was on fire and she was certain that there was an embarrassing wet spot pressed into the back of her nightgown. She removed her fingers from Lena’s nipple. Before their absence could be mourned she leaned down to replace them with her mouth.

Lena’s reaction was instantaneous. She tangled her fingers into Kara’s hair and kept her in place. Out of her depth but eager, Kara laved the skin with her tongue and sucked at it. The act reminded her of learning a new language—it was both foreign and intuitive, and she depended entirely on Lena’s soft moans to indicate if she was saying the right thing. It seemed she was.

The woman beneath her was twisting and sighing, responding to Kara’s messy coaxing with verve. Kara herself was aching between her thighs, the experience like touching herself but put through a magnifying glass. The bounds of her desire were apparently flexible and very capable of being broadened, if by deft enough hands.

Lena was clearly partial to her attentions but seemed either unable or unwilling to abet Kara in her endeavors. There were, of course, the few bits of knowledge that she’d parceled out before. It wasn’t much, but it was enough for Kara to make a salient and firm choice. She removed her mouth from Lena’s nipple and relished a little cruelly in her bereft moan, and grasped her thighs as she shuffled backward. Lena’s body was dragged with her until she was enough on the bed that she was laying flat without her head hanging off, and at an angle so that Kara had enough room to settle between her legs.

Acting before she could second guess herself, Kara pushed the hem of Lena’s shift up about her hips and exposed her thighs, her belly, and the coarse hair between her legs. She thought with a distant sense of wonderment that she’d never known a person could blush so many places—Lena’s cheeks were pink but so was her neck, the skin around her navel, her thighs. She looked edible. Kara scraped her blunt nails down the skin around Lena’s center just for the reaction she knew it would elicit and wasn’t disappointed when Lena groaned, long and low, and stretched her arms above her head.

Kara expected to be intimidated by the prospect of doing it but in reality only felt famished. Was there a protocol for this sort of thing? She supposed you might want to work somebody up, but Lena already looked like she might fall apart under a feather’s touch, biting at the inside of her bicep as she was. So Kara bent her head, stroked at her inner thighs, and began her work.

The first lick was like the touch of a candle’s flame. Lena sobbed, broken and muffled into the skin of her arm, and bucked up into Kara’s open mouth. The taste was strange but not unwelcome, and it was slick and messy and completely wonderful. Every sloppy, uncoordinated lick had it’s complimenting moan from above her. Lena’s thighs trembled, her body tensed and searched for purpose against Kara’s face. She’d never experienced anything like it in all her years—it set her wild, and her hand was reaching between her own thighs to alleviate some of the pressure before she’d realized what she was doing.

“Please, _please_ —” Lena sobbed, desperate. The arm that wasn’t pressed against her mouth was tangled in her dark hair, pulling. Kara noted that her strategy of licking messy stripes up and down only seemed to be exacerbating without really helping, but it was difficult to focus on any one motion while she was in the verge of bringing herself over the edge.

That thought spurred an idea and Kara re-focused her attentions, matching up the movement of her tongue with that of her hand. It was a dial turned all the way up. Kara felt a heel dig into her back and Lena’s body lift up off the mattress in a beautiful arch. There was no concentrating between the demand in her body for release, her fingers slipping around her own clit, and trying to keep her movements consistent against Lena’s.

Kara groaned and bore against her own hand when Lena pressed her hips against her face, desperate. She knew she wouldn’t last for much longer and was beginning to lose the last thread of control she possessed of her body. She looked up; it was a mistake. Lena cut the most erotic picture Kara had ever seen, arched off the bed with her mouth open in a silent scream and eyes screwed shut. Her shimmie was disheveled and bunched in her middle, exposing her breasts and stomach. With her last cognizant thought, Kara took notice of the red and purple bruise blooming against her nipple. A bruise she’d created herself, sucking, licking.

The orgasm hit her hard enough that she had to stop the movement of her mouth, crying out as her body shook with the force of it. It only took a few seconds more of work before Lena tumbled over the edge as well, finally releasing a long-held shout that would probably be heard by the entire house. Kara couldn’t bring herself to care.

Her body was limp in the aftermath. She allowed Lena to pull her up and stroke her cheek and finally, finally press their mouths together into a kiss that curled Kara’s toes. There was slickness on both of their faces. Kara from Lena’s release, and Lena from what felt like tears. It was somehow more intimate to be kissing Lena with the woman’s own bodily fluids smeared on her cheeks and chin than it’d been to make the mess in the first place. For the first time that evening, Kara felt shy.

It was easy in the aftermath to allow Lena to pull the shift over her head and arrange her under the heavy blankets. Kara could scarcely keep her eyes open, and her body was molasses, but she sensed that Lena wanted to talk about something. She joined her beneath the sheets, also relieved of her clothes, and snuggled close to Kara’s side.

“Kara.” She murmured. Kara’s eyes were fluttering closed. Lena’s fingers stroked against her cheek. “Kara.”

“Mmm?”

“How are you feeling?”

Kara smiled. “Amazing. It was wonderful.” Just thinking about what they’d done began to wake her back up, especially in certain places of her body. She took notice of Lena’s skin and how close to her own it was. “What if we were to do it again?”

Lena blinked up at her and submitted when Kara rolled on top, gathering the bedding all around them. She spread her thighs open at the touch of Kara’s hand and sighed when her fingers touched her still-slick folds. Kara hummed in surprise when she was stopped by a hand grabbing her wrist.

“We need to talk.” Lena said. Her tone was enough to cause Kara to pull back and listen. “It’s about Lex.”

***

“I had a lover.” Lena was arranged so that her naked back was to Kara, hair passed loosely over one shoulder. “Before any of this. She was a maid. Her name was Margot.”

“Mrs. Luthor didn’t approve.” Kara guessed. All of the glow from their encounter was gone, replaced with a sense of foreboding. Lena laughed mirthlessly.

“Lillian caught us trysting and had a hysterical fit. She threatened to send me away while she found me a suitable husband to cure my...instability. I went to Lex and begged him to talk some sense into her.” Lena placed a hand over her mouth then, looking into the distance with a faraway expression. There was something sickening settling into the pit of Kara’s stomach. “I had no idea then—how could I? Nothing had come to pass yet, and when—God, even when they found her, I thought nothing of it. It wasn’t until after the fire—“

“Found her?” Kar questioned. “After the stroke?”

Lena turned to her and gripped at her hand so tightly it was painful. Her gaze was heavy. “There was no stroke, Kara. We found her at the bottom of the kitchen stairs.” The fire cracked and the bedside candle flickered. “I need you to answer this question for me honestly. It’s very important. How has Lillian seemed to you?”

Kara swallowed. She knew at once, even if she couldn’t articulate it—something was very wrong. Their honeymoon, if they’d ever had it, was being brutally cut short. Still, she answered frankly, even if the words sent a chill running down her spine. “Frightened.” Kara said. “She’s seemed very, very frightened.”

***

“Kara, my God!” Despite herself, Kara smiled as Alex came tramping out of the house and onto the snow covered garden. Behind her, Eliza stood in the doorway, leaning on her cane with a smile. Kara allowed herself to be swept in an enormous hug, dropping her luggage and sighing into the warmth of her sister’s embrace. “It almost felt like I’d never see you again. But you’re home so early—it’s not even Christmas time yet!”

Kara squeezed her sister’s hand. Instinctively, she glanced over her shoulder. “Don’t worry.” She said. “I’ll tell you all about it inside.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yell at me on tumblr @seabiscuits-us


End file.
